


Triangles Are the Strongest Shapes

by Silent-Wordsmith (Shatteredsand)



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, F/M, Multi, Polyamory, Queer Platonic Commander King, Slow Burn, queer platonic relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-05-24 17:10:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6160636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shatteredsand/pseuds/Silent-Wordsmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One, two, three. Like dominoes falling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. DON'T SKIP LEG DAY

**Author's Note:**

> So, I hate posting unfinished works, but. Well, shit. Don't we all just need something that isn't whatever the fuck just happened in canon? Excuse any mistakes, please, I really just wanted to get this up and out there as soon as possible.

_Roan_

The alarm trills softly in the predawn darkness and Roan thinks about just not getting up. He doesn’t have his first class for another four hours. He could get so much sleep. So much. He’ll run a few extra miles tomorrow and call _that_ leg day. It’ll be fine.

There’s a sudden banging on his door just as he’s about to drift off again that tells him, no, he’s an idiot. It will not be fine.

“Roan. You aren’t up. Why aren’t you up? It’s leg day.”

“I’m up!” He isn’t up. But he’s getting up. He’s getting up right this very second. It’s a foolish man, or a suicidal one, who keeps Lexa Woods waiting. He doesn’t bother with a light; benefits of adopting Lexa’s proclivity towards Spartan living: he knows where everything is, always, and there’s never anything to trip over. It takes him no more than two minutes to pull on his shorts and slip into his socks and shoes. He’s running a hand through his sleep mussed hair—it always gets so damn tangled at night when he forgets to braid it—when he opens the door.

Alexandria Rose Woods is stunning, even at four thirty in the morning on a random Tuesday in the middle of November. A mane of long brown hair curling in gentle waves around her face and down her shoulders. Cheek bones that could ruin cities and a jawline that could start wars and eyes so green they make every forest seem bland and lifeless. The grace hidden in her small body, in muscles that seem far too trivial to bear the strength he’s seen her exert so effortlessly.

In another life, Roan could absolutely fall devastatingly in love with Lexa Woods.

“You were going to skip leg day, weren’t you. Again.” Measured words and even tone, and Roan can still feel the disappointment dripping from her. Once! He had skipped leg day once, and she’s never going to let him forget it until the day one or both of them are in the ground. She’ll probably be standing at his graveside, giving a touching eulogy about how great a guy he was when he wasn’t skipping leg day like the worst kind of gym trash.

“No. Of course not.”

“Roan, I refuse to be friends with someone who allows himself to have both a six pack and scrawny chicken legs. Balance is important.”

“Lex.” Roan smiles his most charming smile. It’s just roguish enough to promise a time both fun and dirty while still maintaining nearly all his polish and shine from a life spent sitting through formal dinners and frequent photo ops splashed across the society pages. On any woman who is not Lexa, or inclined as Lexa is, it would be enough to get him out of leg day all together, spending the hours before class getting a _different_ sort of workout. “Relax. Please?”

He wonders, not for the first time, what part of Lexa’s well and truly fucked up childhood has her so concerned with proper diet and exercise when she could be stressing out about finals week’s approach instead. Or, hell, she talented; she’s probably doing both and only bothering him about the exercise and diet portion of it.

“I am relaxed.” Tragically, he knows she’s telling the truth. This, with all the tension in her shoulders and steel in her spine and fire in her eyes, is just about as relaxed as she gets while still conscious.

“Lead on then, Commander.” Roan gestures towards the door. “Don’t want to miss leg day.”

OooO

Leg day is awful. Roan hates leg day. He doesn’t mind running, never has, but all the squatting and the lunging and the step ups for _days_. And, yes, his ass looks amazing—thank you, Lexa, for that completely unnecessary compliment, platonic life partner who is platonic—but seriously. He hates leg day.

It’s a stupid thing to hate because Lexa is right—Lexa is _always_ right—and being balanced is important and he would look like some stupid internet meme as top heavy as he is without the leg work to support his build. And he likes the part after leg day, where he can still feel the burn in his quads and thighs and, yes, glutes. Something about actually doing it, though…it’s annoying, in a way that Roan never considers gym time to be.

 It’s an almost blasphemous thought, to be sure. The gym is hallowed ground and exercise is sacred and he feels like an ungrateful little shit because he gives his body to communion in the work. It’s where he finds his solace and his strength. He doesn’t care if it makes him sound like some meathead to admit it; he worships at the altar of sweat and dedication.

It’s not about vanity. He looks good, has since puberty, really. It isn’t the point though. And it’s not about being healthy, though being friends with Lexa means that he’s never unaware of how much good he’s doing his body. It’s just. There’s a focus in working out. An exclusion of all things that are not the run, not his own body.

 _It’s about control_. He can practically hear his childhood shrink whispering, though it’s been years since he’s paid any mind to what Dr. Ontari might have had to say. A spy reporting his every passing thought and lingering emotion to his mother, she may have been, but that doesn’t mean she was wrong.

When he’s working out, putting his body through its paces, he can feel every inch of himself. Feel the blood pounding in his veins, his heartbeat thundering in his ears, and there isn’t a single thing he does not control when he decides to push through another rep, to run the extra mile, to add another weight. There’s nothing he does not control when he decides that, no, that’s enough; he’s _done_ enough.

It’s a choice. It’s control.

And, bright side, it’s a few good hours spent with Lexa.

Roan could always use more time with Lexa in his life.

“I hate you.” This is how he tells her that. “And I hate leg day.”

“Stop being a baby about it.” Lexa rolls her eyes, refusing to pause her cool down stretching long enough to actually look at him. “Leg day is important.”

“I’m going to buy out every drop of Trikru Juice in the state and make you watch me pour it down the drain.” Roan’s had enough stretching, and, having mentioned it, he actually really wants some Trikru Juice.

“By all means.” Lexa waves him off carelessly. “Titus will send you a thank you card for boosting state sales.”

“I _hate_ you.”

“Bring me back a bottle of blueberry mango.”

“I know what you drink.”

OooO

The daylight shouldn’t be a surprise. Every day, they start before the sun drags its lazy ass over the horizon and every day, they work as it climbs further into the sky and every day, Roan squints into the light like he’s spent the last six years in some dank cell somewhere. It’s not like the gym doesn’t have windows; the light is right there, he can see it painting golden stripes along the walls. And still, _still_ , he’s blindsided by the brightness.

His fitbit watch tells him that he has two hours to get home and get ready before his first class of the day. He really shouldn’t have signed up for a nine am. Stupid Lexa being all persuasive and logical and going on about “graduation requirements”. He’s _Roan Azgeda_ ; he doesn’t even need this degree to have a guaranteed position with a six figure salary.  He doesn’t even need that position to live in the manner he’s accustomed for the rest of his life.

“Race you back home?” It’s supposed to be a joke; they’ve _just_ finished leg day. But, honestly, he should know better than challenge Lexa. There’s competitive and then there’s Lexa. Everything feels like a fight for survival with that girl.

“Winner gets first shower.” She smirks at him, and then she’s gone.

Which is how Roan ends up sprinting the ten miles back to their apartment after two hours of leg day madness.

He loses the race, but that’s not a surprise; Lexa has always been faster than him. She’s been outrunning him for years now. He doesn’t mind. Let the next guy over puff out his chest and defend his fragile masculinity over being beaten by a girl. He’s good. He’s high on endorphins and the sound of Lexa laughing as she mocks him on the way to the shower.

“See what happens when you prize power over precision, Ice King?”

“Go eat a leaf, Trikru! I let you win because I couldn’t stand the stench!” He shouts at her retreating back. He will, however, defend his fragile masculinity from blatant slander about disproportionate focus in his regimen. That shit is sacrosanct.

“Liar!”

Roan rolls his eyes and sets about making breakfast since his best friend is the kind of asshole who adds completely unnecessary bargains on friendly races that weren’t even supposed to be races because he was joking when she should be helping him feed them. Lexa _knows_ he always fucks up the ratios in their protein shakes.

He thinks about trying again, if only to force her to drink a shoddy mix of whey and banana and apple that will be truly the worst kind of chunky and watery and generally unpleasant, but the fact that he would have to choke down one as well convinces him to leave it. He breaks out the free range eggs that Lexa insists they buy—seriously, though, an egg is an egg is an egg; why does it matter how happy the chicken who laid it is?—and starts scrambling while the pan heats up.

In goes avocado, spinach, tomato, and a handful of feta. It’s not the most extravagant of meals, not by any measure, but this scramble is something of a specialty of his. It’s delicious and it’s relatively quick and it’s Lexa’s favorite. He leaves the burner on its lowest setting when he hears the shower shut off, passing Lexa in the hallway.

 “Eggs on the stove.”

“Thank you, Roan.”

“Don’t thank me; I only do it so you’ll make me a shake I actually want to drink.”

“Of course.”

OooO

His eggs are good and his first sip of protein shake is heavenly. Really, the two of them should tell his mother to go fuck herself and go into the business of healthy eating. Open a restaurant for the fitness folk and the hipstery, save the planet people. They’re only nineteen, they’ve got time for him to drop every business course on his schedule and replace them with nothing but the culinary arts. It’ll take him a semester longer than Lex to graduate, having basically wasted this entire term on a business major he doesn’t even really want, but…

No. The moment he tried, he’d be disowned and disinherited faster than the ink could dry on the paperwork.

Besides, he doesn’t hate business. It’s practical. Even if he decides to cut his mother’s puppet strings, decides to open that little fit food restaurant, a business degree would still be good to have on hand. Especially since he’d probably have to apply for a small business loan like any other person who isn’t the sole scion to an international fortune five hundred company. Banks like degrees. _Investors_ like degrees. He can just reshuffle all his elective courses to culinary, maybe stick it out and get a second degree after the business one is finished. Mother won’t care how he kills time between becoming qualified to  take over Ice Nation Consolidated and actually having to take it over, so long as he manages to get a few years of experience with the company before the devil finally comes to be given his due.

Hell. He’ll sign Ice Nation over to Lexa and Trikru Inc. the same day they put his mother in the ground and spend the rest of his life laughing at how he surrendered his family’s business to their “greatest enemy” so he could go off and open a restaurant like some sort of plebian.

“Lex. We should open a fit food restaurant.”

“Your mother would skin you alive and then make you eat your own pelt, but sure.” Lexa raises one, imperial brow at him and he can see every thought he just had race through her brain in a single blink. “You don’t really need to oversaturate your courseload with nothing but business and finance, however; it would be beneficial to show some variety. One, truly, never knows what might be required of one in your position. Or, well, future position.”

“I’ll tell her I’m trying to find a way to shut Titus out of the market; she’ll be thrilled.”

“Ice Nation could expand to sports beverages if you wanted them to. It would be incredibly difficult to circumvent the brand loyalty that Trikru Juice has developed over the years, but you could make the attempt.”

“You’re my favorite asshole.”

“You’re my favorite piece of shit.”

“No, I meant your actual asshole. I’ve never wanted to try anal until I saw yours.”

“Must you?” Her eyeroll is epic. Really, there could be a series dedicated purely to how extra and dramatic Lexa could be at the slightest provocation and it’d be such a crowd pleasing guilty pleasure.

“I’m genetically predisposed to dickish behavior and the avoidance of emotional conversations.”

“Typical man.”

“Spoken like a typical lesbian.”

“Gods, what do I even like about you?”

“My rougish charm and dashing good looks?”

“No. It’s definitely not that.”

“Did you just quote Carmilla at me?”

“Yes. And I meant it.”

“You wound me. I am grievously wounded.” Roan throws a hand over his chest, clutching at the metaphorical injury to his heart. Lexa isn't the only one allowed to be pointlessly dramatic.

“You are fine; finish your eggs. We’ll be late.”

“We’ll be six minutes early. We’re always six minutes early. Apollo could set his sun dial by you and your routine, Lex.”

“That doesn’t even make sense, Roan. Finish your damn eggs.”

“So damn bossy. It’s turning me on a little.”

“I can’t stand you.”

“You love me.”

“No.”

“Could do. Might do. Definitely do.” 

“Your arrogance is distinctly off-putting.”

“Really? I find yours incredibly attractive. Something about the way you look and act like you could dropkick me off a fifty story building and I’d thank you the whole way down…”

“I’m done with this. Eat your eggs.”


	2. Saps Stick Together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like someone who actually works out should be writing this. Shit, I don’t know anything about fitness. This was a terrible idea.

_Roan_

Classes aren’t awful. Roan’s endured worse, will endure worse again, but. They’re boring. Lexa shuts down into this weird hyper-intense focus mode he only sees in the gym and the classroom and won’t talk to him in case she misses an important lecture point, and it’s _boring_. He tries to be a good student, tries to write down the stuff that looks like it’ll be useful later, but mostly he finds himself watching the clock and snacking on walnuts to cut the hunger while he waits for lunch.

He slurps his shake extra obnoxiously when the professor dismisses them just to see the offended look on Lexa’s face. “Feed me, Commander. Your army is hungry.”

“One man, an army does not make.” Lexa rolls her eyes at his antics, but he can see the beginnings of a smile twitching at the corners of her lips. “And it is only ten thirty, Roan.”

“I’m a growing boy. I need to eat every three hours, minimum.”

“We had breakfast less than two hours ago.”

“Minimum, Lex. Meaning, at least. Meaning, more frequently if possible. And don’t tell me you’re not fucking starving right now. Because I know you; you eat just as much as I do.”

“We do not have time. We have Intro to Finance, on the other side of campus, in twenty minutes. You should have packed more snacks.” Lexa reaches into her backpack and pulls out a bag of Trikru Turkey Jerky as if to prove her point.

“Why don’t you love me anymore?” Roan whines pathetically, because it annoys Lexa in the best way.

“Roan.” She manages to make shoving a fistful of jerky into her mouth looks graceful, before offering him the bag.

“Lexa.” He doesn’t take it. He doesn’t want a snack. He wants real, actual food. A _meal_. He can be petulant with the best of them when he wants to.

“ _Roan_.” She thrusts the bag at him again, eyes narrowed.

“Say my name like that again, Commander.” He quirks his eyebrows for added effect. Lexa love/hates when he flirts. And he love/hates that she does.

“You’re disgusting.”

“I’m _hungry_.”

“You’re a child.”

“A hungry child. If we don’t get lunch, I’m having pizza delivered to class. For the whole class. I will force feed you an entire meat lovers with extra cheese.”

“I repeat, you are disgusting.” Lies. Nothing but lies. It’s Lexa’s favorite and she knows that he knows it.

Roan whips out his phone, pulling up the number for his favorite pizza place—the one he only lets himself call once a month—and hitting dial. “Hello. I’d like to order eight large meat lovers with extra cheese, one large veggie only, and a large plain cheese, please.”

Beside him, Lexa groans, picking up her pace to a light jog. “You are a terrible human being!”

“Love you, too, babe!”

OooO

Gods bless the inventor of the pizza.

It’s terrible for him, and his diet, but it’s so damn good. Sure, the professor had been less than thrilled to have his lecture interrupted by the delivery, but, worth it; the rest of the class was thrilled. Including Lexa, though she glowers at him for the remainder of the class. Roan doesn’t know anyone else who can look murderous with a mouth full of greasy, cheesy goodness. Well, maybe Anya. But Anya is a level of terrifying only just short of ferocious hellbeast who can and will cut a man in half with her cheekbones, so. Doesn’t count. Also, Indra. And Gustus. And. Actually, all of Titus’ fosterling are absolutely terrifying in the best and worst ways, what’s up with that?

“Lexa.” She’s ignoring him, other than the glare, because he disrupted learning time with food and because he’s semi-coerced her to break diet and stuff her face with deliciousness, but that’s never stopped Roan before and it certainly isn’t going to stop him now. “Lexa. _Lex_.  How come Titus only takes in the freakishly frightening kids?”

The glare breaks then, a flicker of confusion before shuttering into blank-face so fast that Roan feels like he’s been whiplashed.

“Titus takes the children from the group homes; the ones others refuse to foster. We learn to be frightening to be safe.”

Roan flinches like she’s slapped him. He does this sometimes. He forgets that Lexa had a life before she was fifteen and the only other minor at the formal event their families had been invited to, that for all her polish and shine in the here and now she was born and raised in something far rougher and crueler, that they’re best friends but there are parts of her that he will never be able to understand.

“Lex.” He wants to apologize, he never _means_ to stick his foot in his mouth, but he doesn’t know how to without coming off as pitying or condescending.

“Enough.” Lexa looks down at her notes. He hates that. Hates when he won’t look him in the eye. “I’m trying to learn.”

Roan lets it go. He doesn’t know what to say anyways…

Oooo

Lexa is withdrawn from him for the rest of the day. It’s nothing as overt as outright avoiding him, or even just refusing to speak with him. She’s there, making idle small talk about Arkadia’s chances come playoff season and how he’s Alaskan, not Canadian, why does he love curling so much? But her eyes are distant, hollowed out, and she doesn’t smile once. She’s never particularly smiley, but he can usually drag more than a few across her lips throughout the day.

Not today though. Today, Lexa is right next to him and miles away. It makes a part of him ache, the part he tries not to think about—the part that whispers, but _what **if**_ , and reminds him that his heart is just as susceptible to delusion as any other fool’s who doesn’t know even when he knows better—and he has to swallow back a hundred half-formed assurances and ill-conceived questions . He knows better, dammit.

So maybe in this life, not some abstract _other_ , he’s already devastatingly in love with Lexa Woods. Irrelevant.

This isn’t about him. He fucked up and Lexa withdrew, and it’s his fault bit it isn’t _about_ him. He gives her space. He’d learned a long time ago that Lexa just needs some time to pull herself out of wherever his careless words have sent her back to. He makes her favorite for dinner, though, some silent apology for all the things he hasn’t learned how to say.

She goes to bed early that night, while he’s still sprawled across the living room floor—he can never find a desk big enough for the kind of mess he inevitably makes whenever he’s trying to actually _do_ something—with ESPN turned down low in the background, when she’d normally be right beside him for hours more. It’s actually stupidly hard to concentrate on the figures without Lexa grumbling under her breath about proper back support or whichever professional athlete has managed to fuck up that day. He even misses proof-reading her damn linguistic analysis essays.

It’s disgusting. He’s disgusting.

“Godsdammit, Lex.” Roan groans, flopping bonelessly to the floor. “Stop making it hard to do shit without you.”

OooO

Roan goes to bed early that night, too.

He doesn’t say a word, slipping beneath the sheets, careful not to jostle the body already sleeping there. Lexa doesn’t crawl into his bed often, and they don’t talk about it. He’s not an idiot, he knows better than to read something between the lines that isn’t there. Sometimes, it’s just nice to lie beside someone. There’s nothing hidden beneath the surface of Lexa needing to know that he’s there, that he’s right there. It doesn’t mean a damn thing more than that she’s had a shit day and she needs some fucking human contact.

It’s a privilege, being the one who’s there for her, the one she turns to when the world’s too hard to face alone. It doesn’t mean that she loves him any more, any _differently_ , than she already did before she was in his bed. Friends cuddle just as much as lovers do. Maybe less so when they’re men, all that fragile masculinity, no homo bro bullshit. But that’s societal conditioning. That’s expectation versus actual want and real need. Lexa has beaten that kind of ignorant stupidity out of him a long time ago. The idea that the only people that touch each other are lovers and girl friends is crap. The idea that Lexa is conveying a deeper need for his _dick_ by merit of wanting to fall asleep next to him is Nice Guy ™ douchery.

Roan is Lexa’s friend. Possibly her best friend, if Anya is discounted on the technicality of being more her sister than her friend. Her being in his bed is no more inherently sexual than Lincoln being there. Her need for human touch, for platonic intimacy, it’s not an open invitation for him to sate the part of him that sees the swell of her breast and the curve of her ass and _howls_. He’s better than that, and she deserves better than that, and they are both more than the parts that stir when presented with an attractive potential bedfellow.

“Roan?” Lexa sleeps too lightly for him to ever sneak into bed beside her without waking her, no matter how hard he tries.

“Go back to sleep, Lex.” It feeds something in him, something he deliberately doesn’t think about, when she moves closer to him in her semi-conscious state. He feels like the ancient warrior-protector, the one fighting to come and bring comfort back to his loved ones. Cuddling closer until she’s resting his head against his chest and her arm has crossed the remaining space between them to flop over his stomach, his arm curled around her waist. “I love you.”

He means it all ways, but mostly in the way that means that he cannot imagine his life without her in it, however she chooses to be there. He means it in the way that won’t let her allow him to skip leg day. In the way that is egg scrambles and protein shakes. In early morning classes and spontaneous pizza parties mid-lecture. In the words he’d said without thought and the comforting he’s only just barely allowed to do in their wake. In the nights and mornings she spends in his bed and the nights and mornings she spends in her own.

He means it in the _I would marry you tomorrow if you wanted_ way and in the _would you be the best man at my wedding_ way. Because he can love her until his dying breath and still never want or need them to be more than exactly what they are right now in this moment.

“You are a sap, Ice King.” Her response is less words and more breath puffed across his chest as she manages to burrow somehow more fully into him.

“You love me.”

“I do.” A jaw cracking yawn, too cute for words, and then, “Pretend you don’t know.”

“Anything for you, I suppose.” Roan chuckles. As if he could ever pretend that he doesn’t know, as if Lexa wouldn’t fly into some kind of panic at the very idea that he might feel underappreciated and unloved. As if she doesn’t show him how much she loves him a hundred thousand times a day. If he ever even hinted that he thought she didn’t love him, she’d probably do something drastic and painfully nerdy like call Titus’ lawyers and have them draw up Official Forever Friendship™ contracts.

“Sap.”

Yeah. He’s a fucking sap. But it’s entirely her fault, and he’s not even the only one, so fuck it. Nothing to be done for it.

“Go the fuck to sleep, Commander.”

 


	3. You're My Favorite Routine, Bro

_Lexa_

In the morning, Roan has the decency to not treat her like glass—and he never has but it takes her by surprise every time all the same—and Lexa is thankful. She doesn’t need to be coddled, and she appreciates that Roan has never even tried.

“Come on, Azgeda!” Lexa taunts, jumping up to wrap her hands around a sturdy branch and begin the twelfth mile mark set of pull-ups. “Keep up!”

“Suck my dick!” Roan grunts back; he’s hardly two steps behind her but any distance is mocking distance for them. “It’s been twelve fucking miles!”

“No stamina, Ice King! No stamina!”

“Twelve. Miles.” Roan reiterates, throwing his body up next to hers to begin his set.

“And another to go! So. Keep. Up.”

“I _hate_ you.”

It’s a good morning.

OooO

Wednesdays are their late start day, because Roan had whimpered and whined like the precious princeling he is at the idea of loading their schedules with nothing but eight and nine am classes, so there’s time for a more relaxed breakfast when they troop back through the door at eight. Lexa heads straight to the shower—because Lexa always showers first, no matter Roan’s constant and ill-founded complaints that she uses all the hot water—while Roan sets about making a breakfast more extravagant than they usually have time for.

It’s routine.

Roan darts past her in the hallway, playfully making as if he’s going to yank the towel from her body.

“Looking good, Commander.”

“I will cut your hand off.”

“And I will thank you for it.” He laughs, disappearing into the bathroom. “Don’t eat without me!”

Lexa rolls her eyes because Roan is an idiot; they have a routine. Lexa never eats without him, why would she start now?

The scents of paleo lemon-raspberry pancakes and sweet potato hash browns and turkey bacon assault her nose as she passes the kitchen on the way to her room, and almost considers breaking routine and devouring the meal. Without Roan and without bothering to get dressed. Honestly, for a man who’d grown up with an army of personal chefs at his disposal, Roan is unfairly proficient in the kitchen.

But the routine is in place. The routine is stable. Lexa will not upset it for the sake of a fifteen minute head start on a meal she knows will still be there when she and Roan are both ready and dressed. Besides, it would be awfully unfair of her to sit down across from Roan and enjoy his cooking in nothing but a towel. It wouldn’t be an invitation, and he wouldn’t take as such, but it would cruel to play with him like that. After all, he’s a healthy heterosexual male, and he has eyes, and both of them know that he’s attracted to her. He’d never act on it, by virtue of knowing that Lexa doesn’t want him to, but it’s there. Something no more under Roan’s control than Lexa’s own lack of attraction to him. Something that neither would ever use as a weapon against the other.

Lexa shakes her head of the thoughts and focuses on getting ready for the rest of the day. It’s not a terribly complicated process. She has nothing planned but classes and then studying, no need to do anything fancy, just a pair of jeans and a black tank-top with a Polis Warriors hoodie to cut the autumn chill.

The water’s no longer running when Lexa exits her room and the door to Roan’s room is closed. She hadn’t heard him.

“If you take much longer, I’m eating everything in the kitchen without you.”

Roan’s head pops out of his doorway, long hair dripping all over the floor and eyes laughing. “I don’t want to hear it. You haven’t even started on the shakes. I slaved over a hot stove all morning and you can’t even make me a refreshing post-workout beverage?”

“All morning? I was in the shower for twenty minutes, at most.”

“You made me go on your devil’s half-marathon before that.”

“I’m not the one who created the devil’s marathon, Ice King; you are.”

“I see your point, but since it only hinders my argument I’m going to ignore it.”

“You’re just mad that I’m better at it than you.”

“I invented the thing; I should be the best at it.”

“Then be better, Roan.”

“I’d be better if _someone_ would stop using up all the hot water in the mornings and would also, please, make the delightful protein shakes _someone_ always does.”

“You make excuses when you should make gains.”

“Oh my gods, Lexa, please. Just make the shakes and let me put my pants on peace.”

“By all means.” Lexa shoos him back behind the door with a wave. “Though, honestly, how many times have you begged a woman to let you put pants _on_?”

“You’re awful!” Roan shouts through the wood and Lexa laughs at him all the way into the kitchen.

Roan is right, after all, the protein shakes are her part of the breakfast routine.

Oooo

After breakfast, Lexa takes advantage of the intervening hour between now and their first class of the day—starting at eleven; it’s practically _afternoon_ and Roan isn’t allowed to have a say in the scheduling of things next year, Lexa’s just decided—to catch up on the studying she had neglected last night in favor of sleeping off the creeping memories. Finals are fast approaching and Lexa will not allow herself to fall behind because of some toxic nostalgia reverting her back to the worst of her preteen years. She’s better than that now. She’s chosen to be better than that.

Or, at least, that’s the plan until Roan plops down at her feet and presses his forehead into her knee insistently.

“Roan.” Lexa deliberately doesn’t lower her text. “I am studying.”

He doesn’t deign to answer, just presses his head into her knee again, because Roan is a shit.

“Roan.”

His answering whimper-whine is pitiful and Lexa admits defeat before the battle can become long and drawn out. Roan won this fight the moment it started because all he has to do to keep her from winning is be there, consistently and irritatingly, so she cannot study.

“You always do this to me when I’m trying to study.” Lexa sighs, putting her text aside and running her hands through his hair.

“I’m a pampered prince, remember? I can’t be expected to do my own hair.”

“It’s literally a half pony with braids. A six year old could do it.” Lexa gives a vindictive tug on the strands in her fist. “And _you_ can do it, too, because you only pull this shit on Wednesdays.”

“Just because I can doesn’t mean I should.”

“Yes. Yes, it does.”

“Mmm, no. A prince does not do himself when there are others to do for him.”

“You are a spoiled child of capitalism, not an actual prince, Roan.”

“Is there a difference?”

“Would you like a linguistic analysis? I can write one up for you.”

“Wow, what do you know, not a prince after all. Just a spoiled child of capitalism, who knew? Not I, that’s for sure.”

“Shut up and hold still. If I’m doing this, I’m doing it right.”

“Yes, Commander.” He immediately belies the words by shifting to snap off a lazy salute. Lexa can’t do anything but roll her eyes and continue her work on his mane of unruly hair.

“A _child_.”

OooO

Roan is persistently present all day, never more than an arm’s length away from her at any given moment. It never feels like hovering, like over-worried caretaking, he’s just _there_. The way he’s always been there since they were fifteen and two kids making friends with each other because who else were they going to talk to when everyone else was at least twice their age. He reaches out shoves her shoulder, jostles her to make a point. He pulls lightly at the curling tips of her hair, laughs when she swats his hand away.

“Spar with me tonight.” He says after their last class of the day—still such a waste, they’ve only just begun and now it’s _over_ —and they’re heading back to the apartment. “It’s been ages since you pinned me to the mat.”

“The last time we sparred, I broke your nose, fractured your cheek, and dislocated both your knee and your shoulder. Your mother threatened to sue me.” That is the least of the damages they had done to each other. The paramedics had to be called. The owner of the gym had to crawl into the ring and demand that they stop because neither of them had been willing to fall down  long enough to concede defeat to the other.

“Yes. But, as I am a grown ass man, she no longer has the right to sue you on my behalf. Also, what if you just stop hitting me so hard?”

“You’re the one who wants to spar.” Lexa shrugs. If the boy wants to fight, he’ll have a damn fight. Lexa has never learned to pull her punches; she knows he never did either.

“I just want you to straddle me in nothing but shorts and a sports bra, obviously.”

“We can have a bout over winter break.” It’s a bad idea, Lexa knows it is. But she does miss full contact fighting. It’s a character flaw, she knows, that she can’t stand too long without a good fight, without split knuckles and bloody lips and broken bones, but it’s in her now. She can’t scrub it out just because she wishes to. “I’m not spending the last few weeks of term reading your assignments to you because your eyes are too swollen.”

“Arrogant much? I seem to recall that you walked out of that gym with your fair share of bruises and breaks. Three ribs, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Three broken ribs, a fractured wrist, and a concussion.  And you are not making a convincing  argument as to why I should bother sparing with you now when it will only lead to more hospital bills for Titus and your mother and time away from study that we cannot afford.”

“We’ll tell our professors that we were jumped and get extensions on everything.”

“Do you _need_ an extension, Roan Arawn Azgeda?” Disapproval positively drips from every word, and Lexa is more than halfway through planning the intense—and, possibly, terrifying for him—academic regimen she’s about to subject him to when he reads her intent and cuts her off before she’s even truly begun.

“No more than you do, Alexandria Rose Woods.” He shrugs.

Lexa narrows her eyes at him, searching for any trace of a lie. It’s been years since they’ve lied to each other about anything, even the trivial things, but if he’s decided to start again, she’ll not let it pass without comment. She knows his face better than she knows the backs of her hands, can read his eyes like a children’s book, and she can see neither deceit nor secret in him. “Then we can delay until after finals.”

“We can, but I don’t wanna.” Roan whines. He’s always whining at her, like he thinks that high-pitched grumbling is somehow a more acceptable way to voice dissent than simply speaking like an adult. Or, perhaps, like he still thinks he’s five years old and pouting at her will sway her the way it so often swayed his nannies and teachers in his youth. Either way, he’s an idiot, because all the whining really does is make her remember with vicious satisfaction the sound his nose had made when she’d slammed her fist into it. “Get sweaty with me, Commander.”

“We were sweaty thing morning, Ice King.” Always with the innuendo, as well. If Roan knows how to communicate outside of lewd comments, flirting banter, or childish complaints, Lexa isn’t entirely sure she’s ever seen it outside of the most drastic of circumstances. Though, honestly, she cannot hold him entirely to blame; she’s engaged in her share of bantering with the lovable fool, has bounced off his words while tossing back her own until they were both slinging suggestive statements around aimlessly. “Beat me at your own game, and I’ll consider breaking your face again.”

“Fine. Spoilsport.” He sticks his tongue out at her, because he is a _child_.

OooO

“I’m going to get shit faced on Saturday. Wanna come?” Roan makes this offer every week, and, every week Lexa turns him down. He never stops asking, though, and a part of her loves him for always making the effort to invite her even when he knows that she’ll decline.

“No, I have no desire to deal with your mother while nursing a hangover.”

Offer, rejection.

“Hungover?” Roan laughs bitterly. “I’m going to be _still_ drunk.”

He is always sober by the time Lexa pulls up outside his mother’s DC residence—the one she bought specifically to ensure that even flying clear across the continent for college meant that Roan couldn’t really be free from her puppet strings and her iron fist—regardless of his weekly claims that he’s going to be blackout drunk throughout the entirety of the weekend. He couldn’t bear his mother’s harshness, her bitter disappointment of him, while intoxicated. Roan is—tragically, he insists—an emotional drunk; there is every possibility that he would wilt and falter and _cry_ if left in the same room as his mother while under the influence.

“In which case one of us ought to be capable of driving then.”

He would never forgive himself if he allowed his mother to see him cry. Mostly because his mother would never forgive him if he allowed her to see him so weak, if he allowed himself to _be_ that weak.

“Stop it with the logic, Lex. Say you’ll get wasted with me.”

Wheedling, further rebuffing.

_Routine_.

“I have to study for finals. I’m already sacrificing library hours to accompany you home on Sunday.” Lexa takes a moment to run her hand over his forearm lightly, fingertips smoothing out any sting her words might have had. She’s not angry to be going with him on Sunday—Azgeda family Sundays are a tradition that Lexa has been compelled into joining, part of the routine of her and Roan. She would no more send him off to face his mother alone than he’d toss her out of his room after she’s had a particularly troubling day. She doesn’t begrudge him the need for her presence against the frigid suffocation of his mother’s demanding, unrealistic expectations and his inevitable inabilities to meet them.  She would never leave him to face the implicit threat of being alone in a room with Nia. “I will not lose more on frivolities.”

“I hear what you’re saying, but consider this: you’re already going to ace all your exams because you always do, and you should go get drunk with me.”

“I always pass my exams because I study. Perhaps you should give it a try.”

Roan is the only person Lexa knows who works just as hard as she does, at any and everything he’s doing. It’s one of the foundations of their friendship. He hits the books just as hard as he does the heavy bag, keeps his mind as agile his footwork in the octagon, and maintains his mental conditioning as religiously as his physical. But he likes to pretend that his just another idiot trust fund baby, more interested in keg stands and body shots than properly preparing for his predetermined place in a life already planned out for him since his conception, and Lexa allows him to preserve the image, however false.

It makes him feels better, makes him more capable of brushing off his mother’s casual cruelties, gives him a lie of a reason for all his unavoidable failures in her eyes. Does it count as a failure, if you don’t try? Or, in this case, pretend not to?

“Nah.” Roan grins, places his hand over hers on his arm. “Hard pass.”

“I don’t know why I bother with you.”

“Cash cow.”

Lexa takes a long, pointed look around their shared apartment. It’s large, admittedly, especially for two college students, but it’s mostly barren. The kitchen is state of the art, because Roan is a pretentious food snob and damn near feral about the quality of appliance allowed into his kitchen and Lexa doesn’t feel the need to fight him on it since he does most of the cooking. The couch is thrift shop quality, because Lexa hates factory mass produced everything and Roan doesn’t care about interior design outside of his kitchen. The television is a modest plasma screen, shuffled off to the side of the room to quietly keep them informed of the season’s drafts and faculty changes without providing distraction until a Game Day when it’s dragged into center focus for a few hours.

There are no traces of the obscene wealth that is Roan’s birthright. Nor of the hardly paltry funds Lexa could bring to bear should she ever decide to; Titus had never formally adopted her—as he has never formally adopted any of the kids he had homed and will home—but he has made it abundantly clear that his love for her, that the family they had made, did not cease the moment she turned eighteen and his legal obligation to her concluded. If she so much as asked, she could be living as a queen. If she asked.

“Clearly.”

“I knew it.” Roan nods knowingly, pats her hand, and rises. His texts are still a postmodern art depiction of madness sprawled across the floor and he steps gingerly to avoid stepping on anything important. “What do you want for dinner?”

 

 


	4. Mystery Savior Man V. Fuckboy Finn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, look, I finally got around to introducing the third leg of this OT3. Only took me four chapters. Smh…

_Clarke_

Look, Clarke’s not here to be petty. If she had known that Finn fucking Collins was going to be here with his damned puppy eyes and soft, broken heart smile, she would have told Octavia that she would be caught at this party when O dragged her cold, dead body over the threshold. But she hadn’t known. And now here she is, dodging Finn Collins and his apologetic bullshit throughout the house party like they’re a couple of twelve year olds playing tag.

She doesn’t want to see him; he doesn’t want to see that she doesn’t want to see him.

It’s a mess.

Is there an outfit that says “You came up early to get to know the area and then spent the summer making me fall in love with you with candle-lit dinners and red roses and scrap metal art declarations of love and then your girlfriend showed up and, surprise, we have the same English Comp 101 class and she couldn’t wait to make friends and talk about her great boyfriend and show off the cool raven scrap art he’d made her because he was always doing romantic shit like that and now when I look at you all I see is the crushing feeling of being made the other woman”? If there is, Clarke wishes she was wearing it.

Tragically, she isn’t.

Finn finally catches up to her in the kitchen. It’s mostly empty, just some guy making a mixed drink that Clarke snatches right off the counter before he’s even finished. She’s backed herself into a corner and she knows it. She’s sure she needs that drink more than he does.

He raises an eyebrow at her, but Finn comes speedwalking in after her before he can open his mouth. She can see a flash of understanding in his eyes, and isn’t that pathetic, now there’ll be two people at this stupid party she needs to avoid at all costs.

“Damn, babe.” The guy smirks, and Clarke won’t lie; it’s the best kind of smirk. Just enough bad boy arrogance and seduction without becoming a sneer or a leer. “You know I would have made you one, too, if you’d asked.”

“Clarke?” Finn sounds confused and, outrageously, _hurt_. Like Finn has any kind of right to be upset that after finding out that he used her to cheat on his girlfriend of five years, Clarke started seeing someone else. That she might have moved on from him and his stupid, cheesy brand of romance that she thought was sweet and perfect and just for her when he was a lying, cheating bastard the whole damn time. Like _he’s_ is the wronged party in the equation of Finn, Clarke, and Raven.

Then the guy comes around the counter, ignoring Finn completely—bless him—to wrap an arm around her shoulders, loose enough that she could easily shake him off if she wanted to, and presses a chaste kiss to her cheek. “Do you need saving?” whispered against the shell of her ear.

The smallest of nods, hoping it’s enough for this guy without tipping off Finn. “Hi, Finn.”

“Wait.” Mystery Savior Man says and his inflection is flawless. He sounds like he’s not mad yet, but he’s _about_ to be. “Finn? As in…” He trails off with a beautiful glower. For a guy who has literally no idea what the hell Finn has done to her, he’s turned himself into a perfect prop.

“My ex. Yes.” Clarke is more than willing to help fill in the blanks here. Anything that means she doesn’t have to sit through another groveling list of excuses and justifications. Anything that means that Finn will go somewhere, _anywhere_ , that isn’t here and leave her alone so she can get drunk in peace like the rest of the student body. “The one who cheated.”

“Oh. Right then.” The guy says, stepping away from her. Wait. No. What? Come back, Mystery Savior Man.

And, then, he flat out decks Finn full in the face. Finn drops like gravity has just woken up on the wrong side of the bed and decided, you know what, fuck _this_ human being specifically. He doesn’t make a sound until the heavy thud of his deadweight hitting the floor, and Clarke realizes that he’s out long before he’s down.

“You dated a glass jaw.” Mystery Savior Man says. Clarke should maybe defend Finn’s better qualities—he was a great boyfriend, you know, aside from the being a two-faced liar part—but she doesn’t have it in her. Also, she should maybe check on his unconscious ass. She’d wanted to avoid having to see and/or talk to him, she hadn’t _exactly_ wanted to see him knocked out on his ass…she’s not exactly complaining about it either.

“Uh. Yeah. I guess. Nobody’s ever punched him before.”

“Really?” Mystery Savior Man raises his brow again, something reckless and charming in his grin. “He cheated on a girl like you and you _didn’t_ deck him?”

Clarke raises her hands, “Surgeon’s hands; not worth breaking on him.”

“Impressive.” He goes back to making himself a drink, since Clarke had blatantly stolen his previous attempt. He’s considerate enough to pull another solo cup from the stack and start making her one as well.

“And you, Mystery Savior Man? What are you studying?”

“Mystery Savior Man?” He grins again. “Oh, I like that. Business and economics, _Dr_. Clarke.”

Clarke doesn’t blush. Probably. Hopefully.

“Not going to give me your name, since you know mine?”

“Nah. I told you; I like ‘Mystery Savior Man’. It’s got this _ring_ to it.” Mystery Savior Man pushes the first cup towards her before claiming the second as his own. “Now, how about we get out of here before—Finn, was it?—wakes up and causes a scene and I have to knock him out again?”

“Are you trying to pick me up, Mystery Savior Man?” It’s part playful and part caution. Nice Guys are a dime a dozen, but good guys are far rarer. She’s not sure which one she’s managed to pick up tonight, and she wants a chance to figure it out before she does something to “lead him on”. She’s just not up for that kind of drama tonight; or any kind of drama, if it can be avoided. Her unconscious ex-boyfriend on the floor doesn’t count. He just doesn’t count anymore; Finn is officially someone else’s drama to handle.

“I mean, I was mostly angling for a dance with a pretty lady, but we can skip that part and go straight to yours or mine, if you prefer.”

Clarke takes a moment to really look at him, something more than a half-glance or a blur of motion. Maybe it’s shallow, but it’s not like they’re talking about anything but shallow, base want anyways, and she doesn’t _owe_ him  a roll in the sack just because he happened to be a decent human being to her when she needed one.

He’s tall, six feet or so, and big. There’s no real bulk to him, but he’s broad-shouldered and his tight tee-shirt is do a fantastic job of showing off the corded bands of muscle in his biceps and forearms. Shoulder-length hair, neat, plaited back into a half-pony braid that should seem pretentious at best and douche at worst, but is somehow managing to work for him perfectly. Neat beard, bringing sharp definition to his strong jaw. Killer ice blue-gray eyes.

Clarke has done way worse and not much better.

He preens under her scrutiny, reckless grin on his face like he knows exactly what she’s doing. A careless confidence, too, like he knows how he’s measuring up in her head.

“Let’s start with that dance.” Clarke smiles, and it’s flirty on purpose. She’s not going to make him any kind of promise, but, then, it doesn’t seem much like he’s looking for one. It’s just a dance, a drink, maybe a good night. Clarke could use one of those. “And your name.”

Because he’s hot, and he’s charming, but she’s not going anywhere with anyone she doesn’t know the name of.

He laughs, open and amused and, for a moment, one of the most beautiful things she’s ever seen. Oh, yeah, she’s going to sleep with him. Definitely.

“Well played. I’m Roan, and I am positively delighted to make your acquaintance.” He offers her his hand and she takes it.

Yeah. She could use a good night.

OooO

Roan’s hands are on her hips, just as loosely as her arm had been around her shoulders in the kitchen, just as easy to step out of the moment she decides she doesn’t want him on her anymore. It’s more consideration than she was expecting. Or, no, that’s not the right word. It’s more _respect_ than she’d been expecting. Because she’s agreed to this dance and shouldn’t he be taking advantage of that? The way every other guy always does? Pull her close, grind on her ass, try and get her hot so she’ll take him home.

Roan dances with her like it’s just a dance, not a prelude to all the things she’s already decided to do with him. She’d think she’d misread him—stereotypical looking gay man, he is not, but stereotypes are not absolutes if they’re accurate at all—but he’d offered to go back to hers back in the kitchen. More pressingly, if she shifts just right, she can feel his semi against her for a moment before he shifts accordingly so she’s not outright grinding on his dick. So he is definitely attracted to her. He’s just not really doing anything about it.

Clarke wraps a hand around the back of his neck, fingers tangling in the loose hair there, to drag his ear to her lips. “You’re allowed to touch me, Roan, or I wouldn’t be here.”

Maybe it’s forward as fuck, but Clarke doesn’t give much of a damn right now. He’s gorgeous and he’s courteous, and she’s already decided how she wants this night to end. If his train of thought is running along the same line as hers, she wants to know. And she wants him to act on it.

She sees his smile for only a second before one of his hands tightens its hold on her hip and the other snakes up to cup her face. Her eyes close reflexively, and she can feel him talking—mouth fractions of an inch from hers—more than she can hear him. “I was only waiting for permission, Clarke.”

And then he’s kissing her.

There’s nothing chaste about _this_ kiss, nothing put on, no show to make of it. He takes control instantly, tongue flicking at her bottom lip and slips inside the moment she parts her lips. He’s careful with it, controlled, learning her mouth in dips and dabs before retreating and starting again. Clarke returns the favor, seizing the moment to take the control back. Roan can have it, if he can keep it, but Clarke isn’t going to let it be easy for him.

She bites lightly at his bottom lip as she pulls away for a breath of air they both need. His eyes are dark, pupils blown with only the slightest ring of frozen blue around them. “So. Your place or mine?”

“I have a roommate who will drag me out of bed at four thirty in the morning, whether I’m alone or not.”

“My place then.” Clarke smirks.

“ _I’ll_ drag me out of bed at four thirty in the morning, Clarke. Just so there’re no misunderstandings.”

“I’m not looking for a boyfriend right now, Roan. I’m looking for a good night.”

“Let’s find you one then. Are you in the dorms?”

She is. Then they are.

It’s a very, _very_ **_good_** night.

OooO

True to his word, Roan is long gone, the side of the bed that had held him after their fucking had wound down into an exhausted, dreamless slumber when Clarke wakes up around ten the next morning. There is, however, a note.

_Clarke,_

_I know you’re not looking for a boyfriend, but if you want a friend, or even just another good night…give me a call._

_567-9876._

_Roan_

_PS:_ _You can also use that if your shitty ex tries to corner you again. Mystery Savior Man could never leave a lady in such distress._

It makes Clarke smile, and she saves the number, even if she’s not sure she’s ever going to use it. Last night had been good. Great. Possibly the greatest sex of her entire life, if she’s going to be perfectly honest. And he had been charming and sweet and so, so generous. But she doesn’t know Roan well enough to say whether or not they could be friends, and she doesn’t want to try only to find it’s a long-game ploy to, like, woo her or something. Clarke really, honestly, doesn’t have it in her to start another relationship right now.

As for the another good night bit…well. She’s never been the type to booty call someone before, but it doesn’t do anyone any harm to keep the option open.

 


	5. It's Not a Joke If You Mean It

_Lexa_

Roan comes in through the front door in the dark, small hours while Lexa is stretching.

“I thought perhaps I was going to have to use my morning run to go door to door trying to find which bed you’d passed out in.”

“There was very little sleep happening in the bed I was in.” Roan waggles his eyebrows outrageously and Lexa has to try very hard to keep her amusement off her face. It wouldn’t do to encourage his antics.

“Were you sober enough to drive or am I going to have to go find your car?”

“Only had two the whole night.”

Lexa’s eyebrows climb. That is a level of restraint that Roan is typically adverse to on his one and only “party night”. The number of calls she’s received at ungodly hours of the morning—even by her standards—so she could pick him up from wherever he happened to be is beyond the counting. “Must have been some girl.”

“I got to punch an ex-boyfriend. It was _fantastic_.” Roan pauses thoughtfully. “You should let me punch people more often.”

“That sounds like something I should definitely not do, actually.” It’s a horrifying thought, truly. Roan learned to fight from the plethora of former military bodyguards his mother insisted shadow—and report on—him and hired professional trainers to foster any and all interest the young heir had shown in anything remotely athletic—good for company image—and she’s fought him. Sparring with Roan remains the only time she’s ever seen anything even remotely resembling cruelty in the man. Brutal and vicious, she had fought him like she would die if she lost because it had felt like she _might_.

Lexa cannot imagine willingly unleashing that on some unwitting drunkard in a bar or overeager and over-stubborn frat boy.

“You never let me have any fun.” Roan pouts, because Roan is always pouting, but she can see him thinking it through now, beyond that first wisp of a thought, and she knows he’s drawing all the same conclusions she’s already come to. Lexa is glad to see the idea tossed away without further struggle. Lexa has the harder head of them, can browbeat him into submission if the occasion calls for it, but it’s always simpler when she doesn’t have to.

“I let you have Saturday nights. Do what ye will; I wash my hands of it.”

“You say that like you wouldn’t be at the police station with a veritable army of Titus’ lawyers the moment I called.”

“No. I would. Though, I’d bring your mother’s lawyers purely out of spite.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” Roan grins, smug in his own assurance.

No. She wouldn’t. But he could at least allow her the dignity of the lie. Asshole.

“You’re impossible.” Lexa shakes her head, officially done with this conversation. “Don’t get arrested, and we won’t have to find out.”

“Yes, Commander. Whatever you say, Commander.”

“Go change. You’re not getting out of today’s workout just because you threw one punch last night.”

“Totally almost doesn’t even count. Kid had a glass jaw like you wouldn’t believe. Felt like punching one of those rock ‘em, sock ‘em blow ups, only he _did_ stay down.” Roan tosses over his shoulder on his way to his room.

OooO

Sundays are combat conditioning days. They rarely spar these days—they’re too capable of hurting one another, too _willing_ to hurt one another, too stubborn to admit they’re too battered to continue—but the heavy bag doesn’t bruise and the speed ball doesn’t bleed; their katas hammer through air not against flesh and their shadows don’t nurse internal injuries when they fight.

It’s an imperfect practice; some things can only be properly performed against an opponent who’s fighting back. But the limitation is necessary. Against anyone else, they’d be reprimanded—possibly banned from the gym entirely—for their ruthlessness, for treating a sparring session like a matter of survival. And against each other. Well. They’re not looking to have an _actual_ fight for survival every week.

Still, imperfect or not, it’s a good workout. They leave the gym sweaty and brimming with adrenaline that won’t let them feel the exhaustion waiting in their bones.

Oooo

Lexa reaches over and pulls Roan’s wrist over her now empty plate to check the time. It’s just gone ten, meaning they have an hour to change into something Nia would consider presentable and ring the bell for brunch.

Lexa sighs and begins clearing their dishes. Roan attempts to help clean up, upon occasion, but Lexa has always been firmly of the belief that he who cooks does not clean as a matter of courtesy. He doesn’t try this morning; he never does on Sundays. When she looks over her shoulder at him, he’s examining his cuticles with an almost desperate focus.

“Okay, but, consider this: we just don’t go.” Roan addresses his hands with careful deliberation in his voice, and a not small amount of fear. “I’ll shoot her an email and say we have way too much work to do. Finals and whatnot. That’s a good reason, right? She can’t be mad that I’m devoted to my studies.”

“Roan.” Lexa wants this to be easier for him. She wants to tell him, _no, of course we don’t have to go_. She wants to say, _you’re an adult now and she can’t hurt you anymore_. She wants to say, _Titus has always helped the people who need it and your wealth does not exempt you_. She wants to say, _if Nia disowns and disinherits you, you will always have a home with me._

There’s so much she’d like to say to him. If she could figure out to make the words come. If he would let her.

“I know. I know. I’m being stupid. Ignore me.” He’s still talking to his hands. He can never manage to look at her when he gets like this. She thinks he thinks he’ll see disgust in her, the way any sort of vulnerability had always been received with in his life. She wants to be mad at him for it, for thinking that she could ever look at him and see whatever Nia sees instead of who he really is. But Roan is a product of his upbringing just as much as she is, and he cannot be blamed for this.

“You’re not stupid.” It’s a pointless pacification. He doesn’t feel stupid. He feels _scared_. “Your feelings are valid.”

It had taken her four years of therapy to finally get that point drilled into her; Roan’s therapy had been notably less helpful and markedly more manipulative, she knows.

“But they don’t change anything.” Roan stands abruptly, chair wobbling precariously before steadying on all four legs again. “I need to get dressed.”

“We don’t have to go.” Lexa blinks slowly in shock that she actually managed to get the words out for once.

Roan freezes, stiff as steel. The tension is visible in every line of his body, all taut tendons and tenuous, coiled control.

“Of course we have to go.” He sounds wrecked, and Lexa doesn’t know how to fix this. She’s never known how to fix this. She’s been trying to stitch back together all the hundred thousand cuts Nia has left in her son for years. But they don’t make sutures for the soul, and Lexa doesn’t know how to bandage wounds she only gets to see when he’s bleeding out and struggling to breathe. “She’s my _mother_.”

When he says things like that, she’s never sure if he means that his familiar obligation is too strong for him to ignore or that Nia would do something he couldn’t recover from if he ever tried. Lexa isn’t certain which would be worse.

OooO

The ride to Nia’s is as fraught with tension as it ever had been. Lexa can feel an apology at the tip of her tongue, and she spends the entire trip struggling to swallow it back down. She’s not sorry. She’d meant it when she said they didn’t have to go. She’ll mean it until the day Roan actually takes her up on it.

He isn’t ready now. His mother’s stranglehold on him—on every part of him Lexa hasn’t managed to pry her cold claws out of—is still too tight around him. Her reach is too deep to shake off with a few years of easy friendship and eighteen months of finally living under a roof without her.

Lexa drives for the same reason they don’t take their bikes: Roan’s hands are shaking too badly to even make the attempt. He’ll steady out by the time they actually get there, shove all the scared parts of him—all the _weak_ parts of him—into some deep corner of himself where Nia cannot find them and use them to hurt him. She has enough ammunition; he knows better than to willingly hand her more.

“Let’s tell your mother we’re getting married.” It’s not a particularly good joke, but it’s all Lexa can think of at the moment and she needs something, anything, to make the air in the car feel breathable. “We’re dropping out of college to elope in Vegas and run a fit food food-truck in L.A.”

“You’re a _lesbian_ ,” Roan scoffs, but there’s something almost like a smile on his lips. Something other than pure, paralyzing fear in his eyes, and that’s all she’d really wanted anyways. “and she _knows_ it.”

“So we’ll never fuck.” Lexa shrugs, eyes on the road. “I’d still marry you.”

She means it. She’s never particularly thought about it before, because marriage is a thing far, far in the future and not necessarily in hers at all, but she would. If he asked. If he needed or even just wanted her to. They’re practically married now, and she can’t imagine a future worth having where it’s different; where _they’re_ different. Roan is her person. She doesn’t want him, not the way he can’t help but want her, but he’s still her _person_.

The people they take to their beds, they never really stick around. They are both too much perfectionists—focused on the routine, on their work, on their futures—to give a partner the time they want and deserve. More than that, when they find someone who doesn’t mind the intense singularity of their attention to a given task, they are often put off, uncomfortable, with Lexa and Roan’s closeness. Between the two of them, they’ve been accused of being unfaithful with one another more times than Lexa has fingers to count.

If she never has a “special someone” as a wife, Lexa doesn’t mind. She has a _Roan_. And he’s her special someone, even if it’s not what all the story books said it would be, even if Nicholas Sparks will never write a novel about it. Lexa loves Roan in all the broken spaces of herself and all the raw, untouched whole spaces too.

“Well, shit, Lex.” Roan laughs, and it sounds _real_ in a way nothing he’s said since they’ve left the gym has. “That’s the damned worst proposal I’ve ever fucking heard.”

“So don’t say ‘yes’, then, I guess.” Lexa shrugs. It’s not a real rejection, and she knows it. They’ll never not be them, whatever label they happen to put on it.

“Oh, hell, no.” Roan reaches over and when he takes her hand off the gear shift, his doesn’t shake at all. “When a woman like Alexandria Rose Woods asks you to marry her, you say ‘yes’. Of _course_ , yes.”

“You’re such a fucking sap.”

“I’m the sap you’re engaged to now.”

“Ugh. I take it back.”

“Nope! No take backs. I’m gonna wife you _so_ _hard_.”

“I hate everything about you.”

“No. You love me. You want to marry me.”

“Let go of my hand, I need to shift gears. And, also, to _not hold your hand_.”

He does, because she does need to shift gears, but he snatches it back up again the moment she’s finished. “I’m thinking a Spring wedding. And a pirate theme. I love pirates.”

“The theme is going to be ‘guess who bludgeoned the groom to death; hint, it was the bride’.”

“Good theme. Solid. Spring is good for you, then?”

“Roan.” Lexa sighs, because this is venturing into some kind of weird they might actually be getting married space. She’s not opposed, exactly, she’s just not sure either of them have really thought this through. It was supposed to have been a _joke_. “Ask me again when we’ve graduated. If I haven’t _killed you_ by then, we can talk.”

“It’s totally going to be an open marriage, right? Tying my life to yours, legally, would change literally nothing but my taxes, but, like, a man has needs. And so do you, for that matter.”

“Yes, Roan.” Lexa can’t help but shoot him a look both amused and annoyed. “It will be an open marriage.” Obviously. Lexa isn’t a saint and she’s not a monk; she’s not going to completely forswear sex just because she happened to fall in some kind of love with a person who she has zero interest in sleeping with, and she’s not going to ask Roan to do so either just because the idiot lacks the sense not to fall in some kind of love with her, too.

“HA! You said ‘will’, not ‘would’! We’re getting married!”

“Fucking hell, Roan. Yes. We’ll get married if, after graduation, you still want a wife who won’t fuck you.”

“Men have been marrying women who won’t fuck them for years; nothing new there, love.”

“No.” Lexa shakes her head vehemently. “I draw the line at cutesy pet names.”

“I see your line…” Roan pauses here, and Lexa can already practically hear the endearment he’s about to drop like the absolute shit he is. “Darling, I don’t care.”

Jackass.

“I want a divorce.” Lexa growls, taking the turn up Nia’s ridiculously long driveway.

“I want a ring.” Roan is practically bouncing in his seat. “Can we go ring shopping after brunch?”

Lexa almost wants to say no. She has studying she needs to be doing. But Sundays are _them_ days, days where Roan is fragile and Lexa often is, too—Nia’s claws sink more deeply into her son, but she’ll swipe at anyone in his life and everyone in the room if the press isn’t present—and the idea of spending the day out and about the town with Roan isn’t the worst thing she’s ever heard of.

And she doesn’t mind the idea of having a ring she can slip on and use like a flashing _do not approach_ sign; she doesn’t mind the idea of wearing something that says she’s Roan’s, and that Roan is hers, either. It’s stupid and needlessly possessive, but he’s _her person_. Telling the world that—even if they won’t understand it, will draw the wrong conclusions—well. Lexa has never claimed to be over all her issues. She’s never had something that was hers before, not really. Something that no one could take away from her. Roan feels like someone who is hers, that _wants_ to be hers regardless of circumstance or convention, and she likes the idea of having something solid that shows that.

“After.” Lexa agrees, parking but leaving the keys in the ignition for the honest to gods valet that Nia keeps on retainer because the woman has never met an overindulgence she didn’t want to shamelessly show off.

Roan clambers out of the car, eager in a way she never sees him on Nia’s doorstep. He holds her hand on the way in, too, grinning at the valet with near painful cheerfulness.

They ring the bell—decorum is of the utmost importance, and this is not Roan’s home—and Nia does them the dubious honor of deigning to answer it herself.

“Hello, Mother.”


	6. Mother May I

 

_Roan_

“Hello, Mother.” Roan greets, smile too wide and happiness too apparent. He knows he should rein it in, make the effort to pretend he’s not as fucking ecstatic as he is. But he’s fucking _ecstatic_. Lexa proposed, and they’re going to be forever friends bound together for life and if that’s not the coolest shit he’s ever heard, he doesn’t know what the hell counts as cool anymore.

Shit, nothing’s going to change, really. Except he’ll stop telling girls he doesn’t want to go home with he has a girlfriend, he’ll start telling them he has a fiancée, a _wife_. But it feels like the best kind of news he could get. The grandest declaration of “I love you; you’re an idiot, but I love you” he’s ever gotten. And it’s not what most proposals are supposed to be, maybe, but it actually _really is_. It was Lexa saying, hey, let’s spend the rest of our lives together. The same as any other proposal in the history of the world. And that’s _worth_ a little excitement. A lot of excitement.

“Nia.” Lexa’s own greeting is more sedate, but he can see that twist to her lips, the one that hides her smile when she thinks appearing emotionless will serve her better.

“Roan.” Mother’s tone is terse, as always, though he thinks she might be just the slightest bit unnerved by his blatant delight. “Lexa.” The afterthought there, the dismissive way Mother has always said Lexa’s name, rankles him. It always rankles him. One of these days, he’s going to find his fucking spine and beat Mother to death with it.

One day.

Today, he just tightens his hold on Lexa’s hand and tries desperately to let this be the one good thing his mother doesn’t get to take from him.

Mother turns and gestures them into the house, the exact same way she has every Sunday for the past seven months, and into the lion’s den they go.

Everything is exactly the same as it’s always been, here or back in the house he grew up in in Alaska. White walls, white furnishings, white and gray tapestries and paintings. A world of white and frozen barrenness. Mother is particular about her things or, rather, the appearance of her things. Everything is on brand— _consistency is important, Roan_ —a modern ice palace for the ice queen to preside over her Ice Nation.

There is nothing that feels like a home here; there never had been.

“You’re chipper this morning.” Mother notes, leading them into the dining room. It sounds like a reprimand. A pointed accusation; how dare he find something to be happy about. How dare he be happy, period. How dare he be anything other than the perfect poster child for Ice Nation and the proper picture of a future CEO.

He almost wants to tell her. Wants to see her face contort with all that barely masked rage when he says that he’s going to marry Lexa. That he’s going to “throw his life away” on “one of Titus’ pitiful fosterlings” with a juvenile record and “no future”. Wants to see the way she’d look when she connects the dots, realizes that if Lexa follows through on her life plan, if she takes over for Titus when he decides to retire the way she wants to and Roan is married to her, that Ice Nation Corp. and Trikru Inc. will become, functionally, the same business. That if he is married to Lexa—and he’s going to fucking marry her, he’s not interested in wifing some other girl up just because it might be easier—then all that he owns is hers as well. That if everything of his is also hers then Ice Nation will fall into the hands of Trikru Inc. the way Mother has always feared Titus wants. And there’s nothing she can do to stop it other than disowning him—and the scandal, the disgrace, the public denouncement; she wouldn’t _dare_.

But this is his. This is Lexa’s.

Mother can’t have it.

Not this. Anything else, everything else, but not _this_.

“Simply overjoyed to see you, as always, Mother.” If Roan has ever told a larger lie, he can’t think of it. But it’s a perfectly acceptable excuse, and not one Mother can disagree with without pointing out how much he blatantly dreads seeing her.

“Hmm.” Her smiles is polite and just as frozen as the décor. “Sit.”

He sits. Nineteen years of mental conditioning to do as she says before she gets mad, to be a good son, to try and please her. He accidently tugs Lexa down with him, still holding her hand, but she manages to make it look somewhat intentional and moderately graceful as she takes the chair next to him. Normally, Mother makes Lexa sit across from him— _you’re developing an unhealthy dependency, dear, a little separation will be good for you; everything I do is for your own good_ —but she’s not about to make scene. Not even here in the privacy of her own house. Not without the rage and the madness and the parts of Roan that disgust her out on display, egging her on with his failures.

“Tell me how you’re progressing.” Mother begins as the staff brings out the first course. Not, how are you. Not, tell me about what’s happened in your life since we last spoke. Nothing personal at all. A clinical, professional _demand_. Tell me what you’ve done that’s good for the business. Tell me why I should keep calling you ‘son’.

“Well.” The first course is a fruit salad and Roan refuses to feel pathetic for eating with his right hand so his left doesn’t have to let go of Lexa. He never gets to _touch_ her during these visits; he’s going to take advantage of it for as long as she’ll let him. “Midterms put me at second in all my courses. Finals, I’m sure, will further cement it.”

“Second.” If poison has a sound, it sounds like that word dripping off Mother’s tongue. Two syllables like venom flying through the air, like an icicle snapping, like a glacier cracking.

“Yes.” Roan’s grip tightens, loosens, tightens again. He stares down at the assorted fruits on his plate as if the answer to how to finally be enough for Mother is hidden between the cantaloupes and the grapes. As if he can find a cure for the thing inside him that she finds so disappointing, maddening, beneath a slice of apple. As if the oranges are concealing the answers that will make him something that does not feed Mother’s insanity.

“And you feel that this will be _cemented_ by your finals.”

Roan does his very best not flinch— _flinching is a sign of weakness, of cowardness; you will be better than that, Roan_ —at the bitter harshness in her voice. “Yes, Mother. Barring unforeseen tragedy, I presume Lexa will continue to best me in all subjects, as she has since we started.”

It’s a sore point. Some should-be “nobody”, some foster child “reject” who had to be saved by Titus’s “pity” because she was so “broken” nobody else would take her, that even the system didn’t want her. Someone that Nia considers beneath them in all ways, besting her only son academically. _Better_ than him, for all the pretention of his up-bringing, the years in the most exclusive boarding school, the best private tutors, the most expensive materials to work with.

The top right corner of Mother’s lip curls, trembles with snarled contempt, and then smooths into frozen disappointment again. “I do expect more of you, Roan.”

He doesn’t flinch, he doesn’t, but he can feel the shudder wrack through his whole body as he fights the impulse to react.

_“I do expect more of you, Roan” and the repetitive sting of her open palm against his face;_

_“I do expect more of you, Roan” and the heavy hands that push, that shove, that slam him into walls, onto the floor, down the stairs;_

_“I do expect more of you, Roan” and the bruises that wouldn’t fade for weeks;_

_“I do expect more of you, Roan” and the glass coffee table as it shatters under impact from his face;_

_“I do expect more of you, Roan” and the hours in the small dark space beneath the stairs._

“Of course, Mother.” The words taste like ashes, like glass, like the small hand with the heavy fist, like all the awful things he makes it point to remember to forget.

He can feel Lexa bristle beside him and he squeezes her hand in warning. He knows she wants to snarl back, _fight_ back. Lexa’s never met a battle she didn’t think she could win. But, then, Lexa has never fought his mother. Not really, not like he has. He knows better. Lexa would win the battle and then Mother would destroy everything they loved with a word, a gesture. Some wars just aren’t worth the costs of waging them. Roan knows that this is one of them.

Fighting against Mother is never worth it, no matter what shiny prize he may think is waiting on the other side.

“Or, perhaps, I should be looking to adopt the young Ms. Woods.” Mother smiles, too many teeth, more like a predator’s threat display than anything else. “Titus never did, did he?”

Roan watches Lexa out of the corner of his eye, watches for the signs that this is the brunch where Mother takes it too far and Lexa finally leaves. Not him, no, but this place. If this is the line in the sand that their friendship cannot cross, the last time she’ll accompany him into the lion’s den for his own sake and the expense of her own.

He couldn’t blame her. He can’t understand why he keeps coming back, either.

“Titus fosters; he doesn’t adopt.” Lexa smiles, too, and it’s the smile Roan has never seen outside of their spars. Vicious and cutting and thirsty for blood. “He understands that, sometimes, people need to know they can _leave_ in order to want to _stay_.”

He squeezes her hand again, more sharply this time, begging her to let this go. Lexa always does this, bites the bullets meant for him, and it’s not her responsibility to fight his battles for him. He hasn’t found the will to fight this one, but that doesn’t mean that she should have to.

 Lexa has seen the scars on his face, the ones so carefully hidden by his beard. She knows, vaguely, what his mother is capable of. She’s never pushed like this before.

He will not stand to have Lexa subjected to one of Mother’s fits; he does not trust that he will find the strength to fight his mother if she loses it.

Mother’s eyes narrow, little snarl again, and then nothing. Again. Of course. “Hmm. What an interesting approach to child-rearing. No wonder you’re all so…damaged.”

Roan flinches. He doesn’t mean to, knows better— _better than that, Roan, **be** **better** than that_ —but he can’t help it. Attacks on Lexa feel like attacks on himself. Worse than attacks on him. He earns his mother’s brutality, twisted up parts of him reflecting something awful in her eyes— _a mother knows these things, Roan; I can see the weakness in you, and I will not stand for it. I do this because I love you_ —but Lexa shouldn’t be here. She should have to sit through this for him. She doesn’t deserve it. She’s better than this, than him, than the words Mother will use to cut her down just because she’s _there_.

He’s the bad son, the bad friend, and she doesn’t deserve to take his lumps so he doesn’t have to.

House staff, quiet as mice and careful to seem more live moving decorations than real people, sweep their plates from the table with one hand and place down the main course with the other. Pancakes and bacon today. Mother must have forgotten to tell the chef that her only son is paleo, and so is his guest. Again. Because Mother doesn’t believe in paleo and she refuses to encourage Roan’s “childish whims”. Or because she just doesn’t remember that he ever told her. Roan is never sure whether something is an overt power move over him— _to cull weakness, Roan, I will only ever show you my strength and you will emulate until you **learn**_ —or simply an effect of her casual indifference to his entire existence when it’s not about the results she wants him to produce.

Roan smears a thin layer of butter over the top and drips the tiniest drizzle of syrup. He already had pizza this week; he’s not going to more than pick at this. Lexa won’t either. Maybe she’ll be distracted by that. He hopes she is. He wants Mother’s attention back on him; at least it’s not on Lexa then.

“Oh, I’m sure Titus’ care of us has nothing to do with my _damage_.” Lexa cuts her pancakes into perfect quarter, butterless and dry, with a look in her eye that’s twice as threatening as anything Mother has ever done. “I’m sure the fourteen years prior were far more formative.”

Roan swallows thickly. “Lexa.” He’s not sure what he’s begging for, but he knows he’s begging.

“Roan. Let the girl speak.” Mother snaps, waves an imperial hand at him carelessly. “Someone at this table should, at least. Look at you. Sit up straight and square those shoulders. I didn’t raise a slouch.”

She didn’t raise him at all, except for when she was angry with him, but he doesn’t expect that’s a winning argument at this juncture. He straightens the curve he hadn’t realized had slipped into his spine and pulls back the shoulders that had subtly been rising as he’d subconsciously attempted to curl into himself and disappear.

“I was finished.” Lexa says, everything harsh suddenly gone. She’s looking at him, now, he realizes. All soft and concerned and worried about him when she shouldn’t have to be. He’s a grown ass man, he should be able to have a meal with his mother with needing a godsdamned chaperone to make sure his feelings don’t get to hurt by his own damn inadequacies, his own fucking failures.

She squeezes his hand, sends him a smile with her eyes, and steals his bacon. It feels so painfully normal that for a moment, Roan forgets where they are and why they’re there. For a moment, they’re just them, back home, having breakfast before class. And he smiles back because he doesn’t know how not to when Lexa looks at him like that.

Mother clears her throat pointedly, and the expression drops from his face like a hundred pound weight.

OooO

The rest of the meal is subjugated by a silence so pervasive that every clink of silverware against glassware sounds like a sword drawn from scabbard, like a bullet chambering, like a declaration of war. Roan wants to go, wants to run, wants to never come back. Roan wants to send Lexa home alone, wants to beg and grovel and hope that this time that’s _enough_ , wants to take his punishment as something he’s earned, something he deserves. Wants to lay out his weakness, all the sick parts of him that make him wrong, and have Mother beat some kind of strength into him until he looks like the son she wants instead of the caricature of one she has.

He wants to be a good son.

He doesn’t know how.

“I’ll see you next Sunday, Roan.” Mother dismisses once their plates have been cleared for the second time.

“Of course, Mother.” Roan rises, steady for the first time since Mother had demanded her answer, and Lexa follows his lead. He makes it halfway out of the house before his steps start to falter. Lexa lets go of his hand for the first time since he’d taken it upon himself to claim it to duck under his arm. Her other hand reaches up, tangles their fingers together, makes her propping him up look casual and sweet as she all but carries him over the threshold.

The shaking starts while they wait for the car. Tiny tremors than shiver from his chest and out to his trembling fingers and unsteady knees. All his sickening weakness, on display for everyone to see. And it’s no wonder that Mother cannot bear to look at him without the rage, the madness. Look at him quaking like the last leaf on the tree in the dead winter. Look at him, walking like a child when he should stand tall as a man. Look at him. Look at him.

The moment the car pulls up, Lexa is throwing him in the passenger seat and taking off at speeds most likely illegal.

“You’re okay, Roan.” Lexa reassures, she’s not holding his hand anymore; too busy shifting gears rapidly. “Everything is fine.”

Everything is not fine. Everything is the opposite of fine. People don’t talk to Mother like that. Mother doesn’t allow people to talk to her like that. And he has to go back. He has to go back next week. He has to go back and take whatever Mother is planning on giving to him because he’s bad. He’s a bad son, he makes bad choices, he doesn’t try hard enough, he makes bad friends who speak to Mother like she’s just another person and not _Mother_.

Roan’s mouth curls into self-disgust. Wonders what about him is so vile that he cannot even bear his own weight. Wonders how he could get it out of him. Wonders if he could carve out the parts of him that are _soft_ and _weak_ and _useless_. If that would make Mother love him as himself instead of as her weak princeling, quivering like a newborn foal in the face of his own inability to be enough. Letting Lexa take the brunt of Mother’s rage, rage he’s earned with all his perverse pieces that don’t align the way they should, the way Mother wishes they would. Letting Lexa fight for him like he’s something worth fighting for.

There is dark, fuzzy black at the edges and he can’t move, can’t make a sound, Mother doesn’t like it when he makes a sound, has to be quiet, take his punishment like a good son, be a good son for once in his life, just once, and the glass is in his skin and the hand is at his throat and

Roan jerks forward, breath caught in his throat crashing out of him in a rush, as Lexa slams on the breaks.

They’re on the side of the road. When did that happen? Why did that happen.

“You stopped breathing.” Lexa says, softly. “Do you need to get out of the car?”

Does he? He doesn’t know.

“I’m okay.” He doesn’t recognize his voice.

“You will be.” Lexa doesn’t look at him, gives him privacy to get a hold of himself, but she does take his hand again. He grips her hand like a lifeline, studies her long fingers—in another life, these fingers would craft concertos, would pen sonnets, would twirl a sword between them, would hold some hand that isn’t his—and his own and the differences between them. It’s soothing, calming, and he’s remembering how to breathe again by listening to the easy in and out of hers.

“You know what’s wrong with your hands?” Roan asks when it no longer feels like Mother’s hands are caged around his heart, claws digging in and gouging out pieces of him. “No ring.”

Lexa laughs, some kind of relief given sound, “Let’s fix that then.”

Yeah. Yeah, let’s fix that.

 


	7. This Town Isn't Big Enough to Not See You Around

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look! More Clarke! I'm trying to get a more regular rotation of their POVs and a more consistent updating schedule going, but no promises. These fuckers all just do what they want anyways...

_Clarke_

College was the _worst_ idea. Why did Clarke let her mom convince her to go? Who invented finals? Clarke wants to know whose ass she needs to kick for this gross _injustice_. She could have run off and done her time as a poor, starving artist while her struggle fueled her art. She could have couch surfed with all her friends and gone to a different party every night of the week and gotten up at noon every day to paint the drunken memories of the night before.

But, no. Abby Griffin had said college first. Abby Griffin said, if it doesn’t work out, if, then you’ll want a degree you can use. Abby Griffin said, it’s not like you can’t paint and go to college at the same time. And Jake Griffin had smiled a little sadly, like every argument racing through Clarke’s mind had already been thought of, voiced, and subsequently shut down. And Clarke Griffin had gone to fucking college.

Which leads her to here, studying for her finals like any of this even matters—even though it doesn’t because even if she spends the rest of her life begging on the street for enough money for a paintbrush, she’s going to be a fucking artist—and she doesn’t hate medicine, but she’s definitely not in love with it. And she _does_ hate the pre-reqs.

She also hates finals, this library, studying for finals, and studying for finals in this library. For the record.

Okay, so that’s not exactly accurate either. She likes the library, when it isn’t full to bursting with practically every member of the student population trying to bang out final papers and memorize entire text books in single sittings. All of _their_ stress is adding to _her_ stress and it’s freaking her the fuck out. Which is why, the moment she notices a pillar of almost disturbing calm with an entire table to herself, Clarke makes the executive decision that that’s where she needs to be.

Said pillar is also radiating a fairly obvious aura of “don’t come near me if you want to keep all your limbs” every time anyone comes even remotely near her table, but Clarke is willing to sacrifice a leg to the cause. If she has to spend another minute sitting next to a jittering mess of a human being, listening to them mutter angrily at themselves and watching them chug Red Bull and Monster like dying men in a desert and the occasional very unsubtle popping of Adderall, Clarke is going to cut her _own_ hand off.

The green glare pierces straight through Clarke the moment her backpack hits the ground.

“This table is occupied.” The tone is perfectly even and, yet, distinctly threatening.

“It’s a big table.” Clarke shrugs, sliding into a chair, because it _is_. Clarke gets it, she doesn’t particularly want to be sharing either—see the mad desperation that has led her here, to this exact moment—but, honestly, there’s no need to be rude about it. Besides, it’s not like Clarke is one of the twitchy ones. She just needs a place to, quietly and without undue duress, type up her final paper on the ecological repercussions of bees becoming endangered and, then, extinct. That’s it. She has all her research, she has her thesis and her outline—her mother is a doctor and her father is NASA engineer who works on actual space shuttles; if anyone has had the importance of due diligence and proper preparation, it’s Clarke Griffin—and she just needs a little space from the mere-minutes-from-mental-breakdown occupants of the library to write. This. Damn. Paper.

She could do it at home to avoid all the madness. Except, no, she really can’t. Because Octavia is operating under the impression that having a new boyfriend who refuses to be intimidated by Bellamy means that she is basically obligated to screw him as often and as loudly as possible, to hell with finals, and Clarke’s headphones are not sufficient for blocking out all of that panting and moaning and thumping. She needs this library and, right now, she needs this table. And gorgeous green eyes glaring or not, Clarke is going to _have_ this table.

“I need the room.” The Green Glarer says. It’s the worst kind of blatant lie. There’s an open textbook in front and slightly to the left of the girl and a notebook filled with frighteningly neat penmanship—the kind of script that people use to get quotes _tattooed on their bodies_ —and literally nothing else.

Clarke makes a point of looking around at all the available desk space.

“Look, I get it. Everybody in the building is a hot damn mess right now and you don’t want it fucking up your mojo or whatever. Great. Neither do I. So let’s just sit here and quietly ignore each other until we’re finished like the reasonable adults we convinced the acceptance board we are. Okay? Okay.”

It’s ruder than Clarke likes to be on most occasions, but she’s more than a little short on patience right now. She just wants to write this stupid paper so she can do something that isn’t obsess over bees for the first time in almost a week. Like, hell, maybe tonight’s the night to use Roan’s number and she and Octavia can get into a passive aggressive _who can be louder_ competition tonight. Who knows? Not Clarke. But she does know that she’s not getting up and moving just because Ms. Too Pretty to Be Real over there wants to be a bitch about the table.

 “Fine.” It’s curt as fuck, but Clarke can’t find enough of her give-a-damn to care. Victory!

She gets out her laptop and her notes and gets down to work.

OooO

Clarke stops working on her essay about halfway through it. She just. She can’t. She’s all papered out. She’ll finish it tomorrow or something; there’s still time before the final deadline. It’s a little less than responsible, but Clarke doesn’t want to grind out another two thousand words she’s just going to have to edit the shit out of later. She’s a one and done type of drafter; rewrites are for anal retentives and those beautiful assholes who can write a _mostly_ coherent paper while wasted.

She doesn’t want to just get up and go home, though. Not yet. It’s only been a few hours, and Gorgeous Green Eyes had settled down pretty much immediately after Clarke’s rant, but leaving too soon almost feels like surrender. Clarke has never been very good at letting things go, even when she knows she should. Besides, at this point, O and Lincoln will have had time for post-coital naps and snacks and will probably be back at it again. Clarke isn’t down for going back home to that right now.

So, she’s doodling instead. Hands are a particular favorite of hers; there’s just so much you can learn about a person from their hands. She starts with Raven’s. Calloused from her work, nails clipped and filed short to keep them out of the way, still always with the slightest bit of grease beneath them, strong enough to twist metal and corral fire, but still delicate in the end.

Octavia’s, child-soft from years of Bellamy’s constant vigilance to being the most overprotective sibling in existence, just starting to darken with a bruise from the MMA training she’d signed up for at the beginning of the year.

Lincoln’s, though, she doesn’t know him as well, struggles to bring the reality of him to life from memory. Strong hands, big, but somehow careful and gentle in a way hard to capture on paper. Trying to shade in the softness when he touches Octavia against the harsher lines of his broken and set and rebroken knuckles.

Bellamy’s, all long fingers and pen calloused from writing yet another paper on the Romans, the Greeks, the Trojans, this history of human civilization and war and inevitable human destruction in the same breath. His knuckles uneven from too many schoolyard fights, too much overprotective need. The taut tension in the base of his wrist, too accustomed to a death-grip around Octavia’s bicep and not yet truly practiced in letting go.

She could do Monty’s or Jasper’s next, but Clarke is tired of drawing from memory. And she could go home, whip out her headphones and her paints, get some real work done if not the work her mother so desperately wants, but she’s still not ready to leave this table. It’s probably been long enough, the Green Glarer probably wouldn’t mistake her departure as running away with her tail between her legs, but Clarke doesn’t want to take the chance. Maybe it’s petty, but, hell, Clarke never claimed to be perfect.

So she starts drawing the girl’s across from her. Long, lithe fingers. Nails clipped down, cuticles immaculate. Something noble about them. No. Not noble, _imperial_. Hands that could dictate in silence and be followed as surely as any spoken word. It’s an impractical image, these hands raising to command silence, to demand obedience; the girl sitting across from her is a student, just another eighteen to twenty-something like everyone else on campus, but the image stays.

Clarke’s eyes flicker up from her sketch, looking to add the little details she’s missed without familiarity. And there it is. The ring on her left hand, third finger. It’s nothing gaudy—Clarke thinks nothing even close to gaudy has ever touched this girl—understated and tasteful with it’s beautiful burnished silver and it’s singular inset diamond, but it’s definitely something that she should have noticed.

It strikes her, then, that she’d been considering talking to her. She’s not particularly ready for a relationship right now—Finn is still some kind of open wound, festering at her ability to just trust people—but the girl is all kinds of hot and that intimidation thing she’d done is kind of a turn on, and Clarke had been considering… _something_. Which is probably the real reason she’d been loitering at the table instead of just going home. Meaningless hook-ups in the library when they should be prepping for finals is the worst kind of cliché, but Clarke isn’t particularly surprised to find herself wanting it.

It’s not exactly a shock, but it is the kick in the pants that she needs to actually start packing up her stuff. She’s lingered long enough.

“See how easy that was?” Clarke can’t help herself. Really. She can’t.

The girl looks up at Clarke’s words, green green eyes intensely focused on her in a way that sends a shiver down Clarke’s spine. “You were not the worst person to ever study beside me, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

It’s not exactly what Clarke had been expecting, but it feels a little like another victory and she’ll take it. She’ll take it and run.

OooO

Clarke doesn’t call Roan, or text him, or anything him. She doesn’t really do it on purpose—he had seemed nice enough, and sweet—she just sort of forgets that she even has his number. Classes have been three times as hectic, Octavia cannot stop talking about Lincoln when she can be bothered to crawl from the sex cave her bedroom has turned into, and Thanksgiving break is in, like, two days. Clarke wants to go home, misses her parents, but any conversation with her mom longer than two or three sentences takes planning that Clarke just hasn’t had time for. So, aside from the occasional half-serious thought of using it for all its booty-call intended purposes, she kind of forgets about the best lay of her life and the number he left behind.

Right up until she’s looking for a spot to sit at the world’s last remaining coffee shop—one could only assume from the wall to wall swarm of pressing human bodies trying to get their caffeine fix—and, conveniently, there’s an open chair across from that guy that punched her ex-boyfriend and then rocked her entire world that one time.

There’s a saying about gift horses, and Clarke’s not about to look twice at this one. She just wants to _sit_.

“Why if it isn’t Mystery Savior Man.” It’s not her best greeting, but what is she supposed to say to the guy she slept with and then never called for no particular reason.

“The illustrious soon-to-be Dr. Clarke.” Roan grins, no sign of any hard feels over numbers scribbled on a piece of paper and left behind to never be used. Good start there, then.

“You mind if I steal this chair?”

“Not at all.” Roan gestures towards the chair. “You’re lucky; just opened up.”

“Oooh. Must have been fate.”

“As surely as you are beautiful.” Roan grins, all charm and daring, and damn him for being so attractive when they’re in the middle of a horribly crowded, horribly public place and Clarke can’t do any of the delightfully sinful things that grins makes her _want_.

“Smooth.” Clarke raises her brows, trying to come off as distinctly unimpressed rather than more than a little susceptible to his wiles. “Is this how you usually pick up chicks? Bad flirting in a crowded café?”

“Nah. I only pick up on Saturdays. Lex would have my balls in half a second if I dared to bring someone home any other night. Too disruptive, you know, what with all the screaming orgasms.”

Clarke flushes, hard. She does know. She’s pretty sure everyone in her dorm knows. She hadn’t thought he’d actually bring it up, though. At least, not like that.

“Should I be upset that I’m not your only Saturday night conquest?”

“No more than I am to never have gotten a call after a truly glorious night. I want you to know that we broke my record. Both for most and loudest.”

“Oh my god, shut up!”

“Okay, okay.” Roan throws his hands up in surrender, before grinning wildly. “You weren’t the loudest.”

Clarke slaps his arm, half playfully and half meaning it. Honestly, they’re in public. A very, very crowded public. People don’t just talk about this sort of stuff like that where they can be so easily overheard. “Enough.”

“Fine, fine.” Roan shrugs, but his eyes are laughing at her. “Wanna talk about the horrors of finals or the alleged fun we’ll have over break?”

“Alleged?”

“No one ever _really_ does all the things they say they’re going to. I, for one, plan to sleep straight through until the big dinner, eat my weight in ritually sacrificed turkey, and then go back to sleep until term starts.”

“Wow, the party never stops with you, does it?”

“I am endless fun. On Saturdays. I penciled it in on the apartment calendar. ‘Endless Fun’, every Saturday for the entire year. The eye-rolling was epic.”

“So, what I’m hearing is that your roommate owns your ass.”

“Yes. That is exactly one hundred percent correct.” Roan nods firmly, completely serious, with a shrug that shows that he’s not bothered to admit it. “Owns every inch of me, in fact. It’s for the best really; I’m not well suited for self-sustained survival.”

“But you’re _Mystery Savior Man_.” Clarke gasps, as if the idea of a college boy not being good at Adult Life was some kind of shocker. Honestly, Clarke had seen Bellamy unloading a trunkful of dirty clothes at his mom’s every two weeks like clockwork because he’d run out of “ _clean-ish”_ underwear and still didn’t know how to measure out detergent. He’s better about it now, post-grad, but Clarke can still vividly remember. Boys are trainwrecks the moment they leave home. Clarke is pretty sure that’s just a fact.

“I specified ‘self’ somewhere in there, I know I did. Which means I can play savior to literally anyone else—including beautiful women with shitty exes—and still be completely useless to myself.”

“You really know how to talk yourself up.”

“Do I need to?” Roan smirks. “You have personal reference for anything I might need to…talk up. I just thought you were looking for a little friendly conversation with your coffee.”

The man has a point, Clarke will give him that. It’s not like she wants him to talk himself up, exactly. She’s not ready for a relationship, remember? But maybe it would be a bit of an ego boost if he had tried. He did leave his number, after all; he’s clearly interested in her.

“Well, it’s not Saturday.” Clarke shrugs. “So it doesn’t really matter either way, does it?”

“Nope.” Roan agrees with a shrug. “I wouldn’t even be here at all, but my roommate is doing research for a class I’m not taking and, apparently, I need to go out and see _other_ friends sometimes.”

“Your roommate tells you when you can see other people?” Clarke doesn’t like the sound of that. It reminds her too much of high school Bellamy, barking orders at Octavia and then lashing out whenever she so much as thought about having a life outside of him. She doesn’t know Roan that well, and she’s never even met his roommate; somehow she doubts she’ll be able to have a proper intervention for them, and there’s no way for her to be sure that this Lex guy actually goes to all the therapy Bell had needed to realize that he wasn’t protecting Octavia, he was protecting himself from the idea of losing her.

“My roommate reminds me, occasionally, that I have _other_ friends.” Roan smile is reassuring, like he can read the direction Clarke’s thoughts had started to turn. It eases the cold, scared part of her. The part that remembers how _angry_ Bellamy had been when they’d first confronted him, how angry Octavia had been on his behalf, even if she’d wanted him to let her live her own life just as much. “It’s an easy thing to forget about, especially with finals on their way.”

Clarke stops to think about it. Other than banging on Octavia’s door to yell at her to please, dear god, keep it down or group studying sessions, she can’t actually remember the last time she hung out with her friends. Or even had just a conversation with them about something other than academics.

“I should probably call some of mine too before they think I up and died on them.” Clarke concedes the point.

“So, tell me, future doctor Clarke.” Roan leans forward a bit, like whatever he wants to know is an urgent matter of life and death. “What do you do when you aren’t being crushed by academia?”

“I don’t know. Drink with my friends, watch bad Netflix.” Clarke shrugs. She never has the right answer to that kind of question. Octavia could talking about her MMA classes and Raven could go on forever about working in her uncle’s mechanics shop, even Monty and Jasper could regale other people with endless stories of their failed attempts to brew up moonshine actually worth drinking. But, Clarke? Clarke’s too busy studying and painting to add another regular activity into her schedule. “And painting, I guess.”

Tacked on to the end, like it’s not the most important thing in her life. Like it’s not the only thing keeping her sane, sometimes. Tacked on to the end, something minor and easily ignored, so that maybe she won’t have to try and talk about it. It feels too personal to really speak about with just anybody. She likes Roan well enough, likes him as a person separate from Mystery Savior Man and the ending of that night, just from sitting here with him. But she doesn’t know him well enough to want to tell him about her art. Not as anything more than a passing mention.

“You any good?” It’s an innocent question, slips from his lips completely casually. It doesn’t feel leading at all, just idle interest.

“I’ve see worse.” Clarke reminds herself not to fidget. If she starts getting all twitchy, Roan’ll ask her what’s wrong and she can’t just say _nothing I just feel like a weirdo talking about my art because it’s fucking weird_. “And I’ve seen better.”

Better used loosely here. Not because Clarke thinks she’s some great talent—though, for the record, she _is_ —but because she hasn’t actually seen much art done in her style. There’s something to be said for being one of the only people in the world who prefers massive mural depictions of abstract thoughts and feelings imposed over hyper realistic portrayals of the Real World. What that something is, though, Clarke isn’t sure.

“Hmm.” Roan grins again, and Clarke braces herself for the typical follow-up. The usual, well, can I _see_ it sometime? Clarke hates that question, because. No. No, she doesn’t want to show a perfect stranger her art. The idea of a gallery or other official showing doesn’t bother her. But there’s something way too intimate in showing her art to someone, one on one. Way more intimate and revealing than standing in front of him with all her clothes off, that’s for sure. “I know shit about art.”

“Not a fan?”

“I mean, I like a pretty picture as much as the next guy. Or not so pretty pictures. But the composition? Brushstrokes? The qualitive emotions it makes me, personally, feel as opposed to the artist’s intent as opposed to what the guy next to me, personally, feels. Exhausting.”

“That,” Clarke blinks in surprise. “That doesn’t sound like shit.”

“My mother is fond of galleries.” Roan says, and there’s something off in his voice then. Something strained. “I’ve been to more than a few.”

“You don’t enjoy it?”

“I like the art. I can’t stand the politics around it. Rather tainted the whole affair for me.”

“You’ve been going with the wrong people.” It’s only after the words are out that Clarke realizes that she’s just indirectly insulted his _mother_. Oh god. Why. She should not be trusted with words.

To her surprise, Roan laughs. It’s just as lovely now as it had been a week ago. Still lights him up like something barely of this world. “Yes. Probably.”

“Well, what does Mystery Savior Man do for fun then, since it’s not going to galleries?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” He raises a brow and smirks smugly. “I work out.” He flexes subtly, like Clarke needs the visual reminder of just how incredibly fit he is when she still vividly remembers having her hands all over him. She’s pretty sure that his body fat percentage is somewhere in the very low single digits, at worst. Possibly in the decimals, if it exists at all.

“Does that really count as ‘fun’ though?” Clarke’s nose scrunches up, trying to distract herself from the memory of just how well he’s used all his strength and stamina that night. Physical exertion outside of the bedroom and Clarke have always been unmix-y things. Like Raven and unsupervised time with things that go boom.

“Yes.” Roan nods seriously. “If you do it right, with the right people, for the right reasons. It’s an influx of all the feel good chemicals in the brain, Dr. Clarke. Exercise makes happy, that’s just _science_.”

Well, the man isn’t wrong. Technically. But Clarke still hasn’t met a form of exercise she can imagine doing for fun.

“Maybe. Does sex count?” Clarke smirks, delighting in the way Roan chokes a little on his coffee and then wondering why she brought the topic back around to sex again. She doesn’t wonder for long; she knows herself better than that. She’s stressed and he’s hot and he’s explicitly said he’s down to give her orgasms.

“Yes.” Roan grins widely, eying her expectantly. “It absolutely does.”

Clarke is still warring over whether or not she really want to go there again. It’s not that she doesn’t want to have sex with him again. Clarke very, very much wants to have sex with Roan again. A lot more sex with Roan. But this probably isn’t the best time and she’s not even sure there’s a place for them to have sex at, since apparently his roommate doesn’t like it when he brings people home and Octavia is in the middle of her sex-a-thon and Clarke had been one hundred percent joking about trying to outscream her roommate.

The moment is broken, stolen even, by Roan’s cell phone going off. There’s an instant change that overcomes him. In the blink of an eye, gone is the guy who’d been casually chatting and flirting with her. In his place, some kind of sleeting snowstorm appears to have manifested in human form.

“Speak.” There’s nothing even vaguely resembling emotion in Roan’s voice. A pause while whoever’s on the other side of the call speaks, and then Roan’s everything relaxes all at once. “Don’t take that tone with me, Lex; you’re the one who wouldn’t let me give you a special ringtone. ‘Cake By the Ocean’ is a musical masterpiece, and you should have been honored.”

Clarke’s eyebrows rise. A song about screwing on the beach for his roommate. Hmm, maybe Roan is less heterosexual than she’d thought. Another castaway from the Bisexual Bay?

“Yes, good. Talk analytics at me, baby, you _know_ what it does to me.” Roan grins at Clarke, his eyebrows jumping ridiculously. Clarke grins back because she can’t think of a reason she shouldn’t. Whatever Lex is saying has Roan rolling his eyes. “ _Breathe_ , Commander. Go home. I’ll make those weird goat cheese peppers you like with the avocado burgers and you can tell me all about the evil professor and his dastardly scheme to flunk the school’s top ranked student before midterms.”

The call wraps up shortly after that without much fuss, and Clarke feels something like an emotion watching Roan talking his friend down from the metaphoric edge with a grin and a joke.

“Tragically, I must cut this chat short.” Roan apologizes after he’s hung up. “It’s the end of the world and no one told me.”

He stands, whipping a gray leather jacket of the back of his chair and shrugging into it. The fur along the collar is white as snow and looks soft enough that Clarke almost wants to ask if she can touch it. It suits him, the look. Something distant and regal. Way different than the tee-shirt and jeans she’d seen him in last time, and why hadn’t she noticed that before? He looks different. He looks _good_. His slate gray slacks and a charcoal button-up with the white leather and fur coat, a monochrome rendering of some banished prince, maybe.

“Thought you couldn’t self-sustain?” Clarke wants to keep the conversation going. It feels like it’s been years since she had a conversation with someone about anything other how amazing Lincoln is or how annoying finals are, and this has been _nice_. She wants Roan to stay, take off his nice jacket and sit back down, talk to her some more, even she can appreciate that his friend’s crisis outranks flirting in a café with a girl he’d had a one-night stand with.

“No. But, damn, can I _cook_.” Roan winks. “If you’ve still got my number, I’m still around.”

 Well. Clarke watches him go. She’s still not the type to straight up booty call someone, but. Maybe she could use another friend. Since, you know, he’s around.

 


	8. Ritual Sacrifices (Part I)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am trash. Regretful trash. Plus side, here's nearly 6k of Lexa and the fam. Who doesn't want that? Nobody. Nobody doesn't want that.

 

_Lexa_

Lexa doesn’t wear her ring home. It would raise questions she doesn’t want to have to answer, force her to give an explanation that she doesn’t have. Titus would ask who, would ask why, and Lexa doesn’t have the words to explain that she’d made a semi-joke and somehow ended up semi-engaged. It’s too complicated for her to try and explain, and, more so, she doesn’t want Titus to get excited on her behalf—and he would be so, so excited that she was getting married regardless of who it happened to be, regardless of everything she has told him of herself and who she is and how her fiancé in no way aligns with the fact that she’s told him that she’s gay—only to later tell him that the marriage is off when Roan finally finds himself a girl who loves him and isn’t bothered by their relationship.

Also, the teasing from Anya would be _endless_. Lexa refuses to willingly sign up for her pseudo-sister’s longwinded speeches about how she’d introduced Lexa to her fiancé, or probing questions about just how good Roan’s dick must be to have flipped her like a pancake—Anya had made that joke when Lexa and Roan had first moved in together, and it hadn’t been funny then either—or, worse. Infinitely worse, Anya would pull her quietly aside and ask her what the hell she was doing. Anya would be scared for her, worried that Roan had forced her into this engagement—and, likely, into an actual relationship—and Anya would want to save her.

Lexa would have to sit there and very carefully explain that it’s not like that, that Roan could never, and once she’d finally convinced her sister that Roan wasn’t brainwashing her or blackmailing her or just flatout abusing her, Gustus would pop up out of the woodwork. He’d be all growling menace to try and intimidate Roan into being good to her—as if Roan has ever been anything but good, as if Roan even knows how not to be—and the two of them would feel obligated to hate him once they inevitably call it off.

Roan isn’t really friends with them, too much younger than them when Titus had taken them in to bond with them the way he and Lexa had, but they are friendly. Roan doesn’t have nearly enough friendly people in his life; Lexa refuses to allow this pseudo-engagement to be the reason he loses the few that he has.

And then there’s Aden to consider.

Titus’s newest addition to the household. Fifteen years old now and still the sweetest boy Lexa has ever met. Familiar in all the best and worst ways. The way he clenches his jaw and juts his chin up to keep his composure, to pretend he feels nothing at when Lexa can see in his eyes that he feels everything so, so much. The familiar hesitancy around her, around Anya. The _almost_ hidden flinch every time Titus or Gustus steps into the room, the careful ways he’s never alone in a room with either of them and their equally careful steps to avoid that as well. All the old signs that Lexa had long ago learned to read and then subsequently ignore. Nobody likes talking about their damage; no one likes hearing about other’s.

Aden, all summer child sweetness, would be thrilled for her—because he hides it well, but Lexa can still tell that she may just be his favorite person in the world—and then he would hurt for her. No matter how she explained it to him, no matter how carefully she broke it down that she and Roan are friends, will always be friends, and she loves Roan but it’s a different kind of love than the marrying type. No, Aden would be furious on her behalf, in a way that Gustus wouldn’t dare and Anya would know better than. Aden would see it as another broken promise in a long line of broken promises, would rage against the idea that Lexa would let someone hurt her like that again and leave herself still open to that person to be hurt again. Lexa thinks it would break his heart to think her heart broken, and she cannot do that to him.

So, she doesn’t wear her ring home.

She’s only had it for about a week, really. She shouldn’t feel so naked without it. Studying her own hands for some kind of mark, some sign, that there was a ring there and should be a ring there, but there’s nothing. Of course there isn’t. It’s just a ring, just a piece of metal, and not one she’s worn for long. Sentimentality in the worst way in her, to think the exchanging of little silver circles would have some visible, some lasting impact, even once removed.

Lexa closes her eyes, lets her head fall back against the headrest and actively ignores the way her right hand keeps worrying the fingers of her left. She misses Roan. That’s all it is, she decides. His familiar obligations and hers diverge every year as the holidays approach. He has to go back to Nia, put on the face of the Azgeda heir, stand by his mother’s side through a slew of formal fundraisers and charity events meant to bolster Ice Nation’s public image, and she has to go home to Titus and her found family of fosterlings.

It was hard last year, too. Roan belongs with her, at all times, in all places. By her side, where he is _safest_. She does not trust Nia’s temper, alone with her son. She does not trust Nia’s sharp tongue or Roan’s paper thin fragility. She has spent too many of her days icing Roan’s bruises, bandaging his cuts, binding his bruised and broken ribs beneath purple-black skin. She has spent too many nights roused to sudden wakefulness by her best friend’s whimpered cries in the dark of the night when his mother comes for him in his dreams and the dark is too thick to let him feel safe. She has seen too much of Nia’s capability for harming Roan and of Roan’s willingness to let her for Lexa to be comfortable leaving him alone with her for five days.

It’s an itch under her skin, a needling between her shoulder blades, a whisper at the back of her mind. Lexa has always seen it as her responsibility to take care of the people she considers her own, and abandoning Roan to his mother’s less than tender mercies for days doesn’t come even close to taking care of him.

But Roan could not be persuaded to stay at their apartment, nor convinced to join her for dinner at Titus’ home this year, nor hear even a word of Lexa giving Titus and the rest of her family her sincerest apologies and accompanying him home for the holiday. And Roan is a grown man, it isn’t Lexa’s place to stand there and try and make decisions for him. If he will not listen to reason, if he cannot be swayed, then she has to accept that and let him go, let him do as he feels he must. All she can do is be there for in the aftermath and take care of him then, when he’ll allow her to.

OooO

Her homecoming is met with little fanfare. In the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, Titus is still at work and Lexa is the first of the over-eighteens to return, though she has it on good authority that both Gustus and Anya are returning at some later point in the day. Aden, Lexa knows, is home from school for the week, but she makes no effort to announce her presence to him. Likely, the driver or one of the half dozen members of the house staff has already moved to do so. Lexa chooses to focus on taking her bags to her old room and giving Aden the time and space to come to her when he feels like it.

Her room is exactly the same way she left it, except for the new sheets on the bed. It’s clearly been dusted recently, as well, but other than that. The same. Her bed pushed into a corner. Her desk, beneath a window so she could still see outside even when she was locked in for days of studying. Debate club and lacrosse championship trophies on proud display on a shelf, next to the bookcase that holds her collection of all-time favorite books. Neatly stacked sheet music atop her dresser, ready to be brought down to the grand piano in the parlor and practiced or performed at a moment’s whim.

Her life, exactly as it was before college, still waiting for her to come home again.

The feeling of having a home to come back to—that she is still allowed to come back, encouraged to come back, _wanted_ back—still feels as new as the first time Titus had asked, tentatively, hopefully, whether she’d consider visiting him during the holidays while he helped her pack for her first year of college. It makes her smile for a moment.

A polite knock on her doorframe draws her attention, and Lexa drops her bags to open her arms up to the boy. He steps into her embrace after only the slightest of hesitations.

“Welcome home.” Aden says, slightly muffled from having his face pressed into Lexa’s shoulder. He’s slower to raise his arms up, to return her embrace, but once he does it’s crushingly tight.

“I missed you.” Lexa says, because she had. She doesn’t have a lot of spare time to think about things that aren’t classwork, that aren’t the routine, but she misses Aden absently, constantly. In idle thoughts and glances of collar-length blonde hair out of the corner of her eye, mistaking a stranger for her brother. “Graduate high school already so I can take you to college with me.”

Aden is very carefully not smiling when she finally lets him go, stepping away from her with practiced detachment that Lexa knows so well. “I don’t want to go to college, though.”

“No?” Lexa can feel a single eyebrow begin to rise before she stops it with extreme prejudice. She’s not judging Aden, but she knows the expression that was almost on her face can be perceived as such. It is imperative that Aden never think she would look down on him or a choice that he has made. Their kind is so casually, recklessly afraid of both attachment and disappointment. Lexa will not give Aden any kind of evidence that he is right to fear his attachment to her, that she will disappointment him like everyone else in his life has before.

“No. I’m going to be a writer.” Aden nods solemnly, and Lexa takes the statement for the vulnerability that it is. An admittance of a future, one that everyone had told him he would never have, and a choice of career that will not be easy, will not be safe or secure. It’s dangerous for people like them, to commit to dreams like that.

“You will be brilliant.” Lexa nods just as seriously. Of this, she has no doubts. She has only known Aden for a year and a half, and she has spent large portions of that time far away from him at Arcadia, but she know that he is bright and determined not to be defined by the ordeals life has given him. She has never been given the privilege of reading something he’s written, didn’t even know that writing was an interest of his, but if he has decided that this is to be his path, then Lexa is certain that he will be nothing short of truly spectacular at it.

“Damn straight.” The bravado sounds all wrong tumbling from Aden’s lips. He’s half overly-formal in the way Titus’ strays always seem to pick up, trying not to be _wrong_ , trying to be something Titus will want to keep, and half scared child too afraid to speak at all because no attention was far better than the attention he was used to receiving; he hadn’t been in the system long enough, or young enough, to pick up the street tricks that come second nature to most of the kids Titus takes in. Bluster doesn’t suit him, but Lexa’s heart melts at the display of confidence however ill-fitting. “I mean, darn. I mean, yes. I mean, thank you.”

And there’s the boy she knows and loves.

Lexa is slow and obvious when she reaches out to ruffle his rust-gold hair, and he still trusts her the way he had when she’d promised him that Titus would not hurt him like his mother had or abuse him the way his father had, that he would be safe with him, that if he wasn’t Lexa herself would come the moment he called and personally kill Titus with her own bare hands and damn the consequences.

Her hand is only on him for a moment before he’s darting forward into another hug. It’s just as tight as the last one and, unlike Aden, Lexa doesn’t pause before wrapping her arms around him.

“I missed you, too.” He’s pressed as snugly into her body as he can get, but the words are startlingly clear. His hands clutch for a moment at her back, small, gentle fists in the fabric of her shirt. It makes Lexa’s heart ache, the moment of desperation in what is supposed to be a casual welcome, the unmistakable feeling of relief from the idea that Lexa would not come despite her promises, the overwhelming atmosphere of being overwhelmed.

Aden steps back fairly abruptly, wiping less than subtly at his eyes and then acting very pointedly like he hadn’t. Lexa, of course, gives him the courtesy of pretending not to have noticed.

“When’s Titus due home? And Anya? Gustus?”

“Soon.” Aden shrugs, the barest hint of discomfort shadowing over him.

“Want to show me how much better you’ve gotten at lacrosse until they show up?”  It’s an easy out, and maybe Lexa should hesitate to offer it, maybe she should sit Aden down have a Serious Talk with him about how he’s feeling about staying with Titus. But she can’t make Aden talk to her about his feelings just because she wants him to, just because she wants to know. She has to wait for him to want to talk to her.

OooO

Aden’s use of the lacrosse stick is just the wrong side of too rough to be legal in a game, and Lexa would call him on it, but he’s being so discreet about it that a referee—if they had one—wouldn’t be able to notice and she’s kind of proud of him, even if the violence is a little concerning. His footwork has improved threefold, his ball handling is excellent, and his stick is always jarring against hers or blocking her shot or tangling in her legs in slightly-less-than-honorable not-quite tripping tackles. He’s leagues better than he’d been over the summer.

Also, if he checks her with his stick one more time with thoroughly dubious legality, she’s going to check back and put him on his ass so they can have a long talk about sportsmanship and how the field is a great place for aggression but not _anger_. He’s allowed to be angry. By all the gods above and below, he’s earned the right to be angry whenever the hell he wants for any number of truly awful reasons, but he’s not allowed to take that anger out on another person.

Out of the corner of her eye, Lexa sees the butler approaching—likely to inform them that Titus is home for the day, or that Anya and/or Gustus has arrived—and Aden takes the opportunity the momentary distraction brings to slam his stick against her chest, the tip of it cracking down harshly just below the netting on hers and popping the ball free. It’s a mostly legal move. Mostly. It’s also carried out with about six times more force than necessary for a friendly game.

Lexa twists the stick in her hand, catching Aden’s as he starts to lunge for the ball and swinging it away from both their bodies. Then she shoulder checks his fifteen year old ass just hard enough to topple him onto the grass.

“You pull a move like that on for real, they’ll yellow card you.” Lexa says, watching him carefully. He doesn’t look upset that she’d shoved him back. He doesn’t look bothered by the implication that he’s not really playing fair either. “More importantly, if you were playing against someone without a solid five years of experience on you, you’d hurt them.”

That makes it through, a little. Maybe. Aden’s eyes darting down to the grass. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

And, well, that’s worse, isn’t it.

“Ms. Woods, Master Trikru has arrived with Ms. Faust and Mr. Grant.”

“Thank you.” Lexa directs to the man before reaching down to help Aden back to his feet. “Come on, kid.”

“Are you going to tell Titus?” Aden sounds something like scared, something like trying not to be. She wants to reassure him that Titus won’t be mad, or disappointed, or any terrible thing. Titus will be concerned, the way Lexa is concerned, and then they’ll sit down and have a conversation with Aden about maybe some anger therapy in conjunction with his regular sessions, about maybe trying to find a less full-contact sport for him, about maybe going to some martial arts classes to help him learn to discipline his impulses. But she knows nothing she says is going to get through the old, well-worn fears. After all, she hadn’t, older than him and reassured by Roan and Anya alike that Titus won’t send her away just because she’s gay.

“I don’t have to, if you tell him yourself before I go back to school.” There’s only so much wiggle room she can give him here. He needs help, they all do by the time they’re pathetic enough for Titus to extend the benevolent hand, and covering it all up isn’t going to do him any favors in the long run.

“He’ll send me back if I’m violent.” Aden kicks at the ground. “They always do.”

Aden had only been floating through the system for two years before Titus made a home for him, but that’s still more than long enough to learn the basics. Fighting, stealing, general bad attitude, that shit gets you kicked back the curb from a foster and they both know it. Lexa is sure that Aden past placements are riddled with families that gave him the boot the first time the would-be dad put well-meaning hands on him and Aden fought back on wild instinct. And there aren’t enough words in the English language for Lexa to convince Aden that Titus will not do the same.

“He won’t.” Lexa says. “But if he does, I guess you’ll just have to move in with me.”

It’s a reckless kind of promise. She means it, but she also knows she’ll never have to follow through on it. Titus Trikru fosters for life, regardless the mistakes and damages the children he tentatively calls his made and have. He won’t turn Aden away for this, for anything. And maybe she can’t convince Aden of that right this moment, maybe she’ll never convince him of it at all, and he’ll spend the rest of his life just like her—waiting for the other shoe to fall, terrified of all the good things given that she now stands to lose—but she doesn’t have to because Titus will prove it every day until they believe it.

Aden looks up at her, blue eyes wide and awed. “Really?”

“Yeah, kid.” Lexa shrugs, uncomfortable under the adoration. “If, by some previously unheard of freak accident, Titus won’t let you stay with him anymore, you can move in with me. But that’s not an open invitation to _try_ and get kicked out, or to tell Titus that you want to leave, okay?”

“But I’d rather live with you.” Aden grumbles, pink blossoming across his cheeks.

“Titus is a good man, Aden. And he’s better equipped to take care of you than I am.”

“Yeah. Right. I know.” Aden shrugs, eyes on the dirt again.

“Come on, let’s go say hi to the rest of the family.”

OooO

“Alexandria.” Gustus grins, crushing her into a hug that may, in fact, be causing permanent bodily harm to her internal organs. Lexa hugs back with as much force as her small frame can muster, but she doubts her bear of a foster brother feels it as acutely as she does. She pretends that the double pat she flails against his back are welcoming and not a tap-out, and Gustus releases his vice-grip on her entire person.

“Stop calling me that.” Lexa growls when she’s gotten some air into her crumpled lungs. “Also, holy shit, did you get _bigger_?”

“Swear jar, bitch!” Anya crows, choosing to express her affection as a slap upside Lexa’s head and a cackling laugh.

“Titus still has that?” Of course he does. She isn’t even surprised.

“I do.” Titus chimes in with a smile as he steps into the room. “And it’s grown very hungry since you kids moved out; Aden doesn’t feed it much.”

Aden shuffles his feet and inches closer to Anya, the woman in the room furthest away from either of the men. “You don’t like it.”

Titus’s whole self softens to the consistency of warm play-doh, or perhaps pudding, right in front of Lexa’s eyes. “No, I suppose I don’t. Never stopped any of these three though.”

“Bullshit. Lexa wouldn’t swear for, like, two years.” Anya points out, ruffling Aden’s hair. He huffs indignantly, but Lexa can see the way he leans into her hand.

“And I don’t swear at all.” Gustus grunts, rolling his eyes.

“Never stopped Anya, then.”

“I refuse to be manipulated by a piece of glass.” Anya rolls her eyes. “I’m better than that.”

“You mean ‘worse than that’, right?” Gustus teases. “Possibly even ‘ _the_ worst’?”

“Bite me, big brother. I know seven ways you break your stupidly thick neck.”

“Children.” Titus sighs, but there’s a smile on his lips and laughter in his eyes.

“I’m a thirty-one year old marine, Anya’s a twenty-three year old lawyer, and Lexa is nineteen and somehow more terrifying than everyone else in the room combined. Can you really still call us children?” Gustus laughs.

“Only when you act like it.” Titus grumbles, shaking his head. “And that’ll be a dollar each, Lexa, Anya.”

“I don’t carry cash anymore. Didn’t you hear? I’m a hotshot lawyer now. Plastic or bust.”

“And I’m a broke college student, I don’t have cash _to_ carry.”

“Lies.” Gustus declares with all the feigned outrage he can muster, which is, apparently, rather a lot. “We all know Titus wouldn’t let you be broke.”

Lexa pauses, considers the truth of it. If she had cut ties, the way some of Titus’ fosterlings occasionally do, then maybe. But like this? As someone who sees him multiple times a year, speaks with him at least monthly, just to reassure him of her good health and contentment…no. Titus would never let her be the stereotypical broke college student unless she outright begged him to.

“Besides, everyone knows that you’ve got the Azgeda heir wrapped around your little finger.” Anya scoffs. “You’re not going to be hurting for money until that kid figures out that ‘lesbian’ _really_ does mean that he has no chance of getting it in.”

In an instant, Lexa bristles. “Roan is well aware of what my homosexuality means for our relationship, Anya. And I would thank you not to demean our friendship into something as insignificant as Roan wanting to _fuck_ me. Especially since we’ve both already been there and done that.”

Lexa regrets the words as soon as she says them. She knows that Anya had been playing, but Lexa is so used to Nia throwing similar jabs when she wants to undermine their relationship, too used to immediately launching to Roan’s defense when he can’t or won’t defend himself. Worse, Lexa had quite intentionally never told Anya or Gustus or Titus about how she’s made the decision to lose her virginity to Roan back in high school. It had been the stupidest of stupid decisions, a last ditch effort to try and be something she very clearly wasn’t. And it had been a moment of weakness, of childishly attempting to be what she thought Titus would want from a foster child so she could put aside the fears that regardless of his words he would send her back into the system the moment he knew that she was wired differently than most girls. It had been a choice of desperation in a variety of ways she does not like to think about, and it had been deeply personal in a way that she never wishes to speak of. And here she was, having outed her own damn secret.

Anya is staring at her with a gaping maw. Gustus looks like a bomb just went off in the near distance. Aden looks like he already knew, even though he emphatically did not. And Titus just looks sad, like he’s already put together all the pieces that paint the picture of exactly why she’d done that.

“I’m sorry?” It sounds like half an apology for speaking around the foot semi-permanently lodged between her lips and half a request for a complete explanation. One Lexa has no particular desire to give.

“Swear jar.” Aden, bless his sweet summer child soul, says in the heavy silence that follows.

OooO

Dinner is a mess of an affair. Neat and orderly and polite, but a mess all the same. Anya and Gustus tease mercilessly, in the harmless way of siblings that Lexa is still trying to get used to. Aden chimes in occasionally, sometimes to her defense and others as the final nail in the joke’s coffin. Titus watches with quiet amusement, seemingly content to wait for Lexa to rally and turn the tables on her older siblings. Or, perhaps, for their rough alliance to crumble and the older children to turn their mischievous claws on each other, as they near always do before too long.

“How’s business?” Lexa asks Titus in a lull granted by Gustus’ full mouth and Anya’s silence after a particularly quick and barbed comeback.

Anya finds her tongue again before Titus answers, rolling her eyes and scoffing. “Boring. No offense, Titus.”

“My life’s work boiled down to _boring_. How could I possibly take offense?” It’s said good-naturedly, though, and with a smile. “Business is well, Lexa. We’re developing a new, naturally sweet caffeinated beverage. Something for you busy college kids and your all-nighters.”

“Lexa doesn’t pull all-nighters. I’ve seen her calendar. Bitch schedules her damn bowel movements.”

“That’s both gross and a gross exaggeration.” Lexa scoffs.

“Barely.” Anya rolls her eyes with gruff affection and Lexa can’t even find it in her to be annoyed. “You pencil _fun_ , Lex. If you have to schedule it, it’s probably not that fun.”

The only “fun” thing Lexa has on her calendar is Roan’s party nights, but admitting that the heading Anya’s thinking off isn’t even for herself will only make things worse, so she wisely chooses accept that discretion is the better part of valor and keep her mouth shut.

“But who else goes to college with Lexa’s frankly concerning levels of dedication and discipline? All the other health nut college kids are going to want what Trikru is selling.” Gustus points out, finally on Lexa’s side for once. “Not to mention the working class fitness type who’ll want something in the mornings when coffee’s off-diet. The boys at Polis would love something like that, for example.”

“What’s the R&D looking like for the product?” Lexa asked. The precise details of it will beyond the businessman—and beyond Lexa as well, truly—but the specifics might shut Anya up for up to several minutes if Titus can build up a little steam. More importantly, Lexa is actually interested. Actually inheriting Trikru upon Titus’ retirement is a quiet and closely-held dream, but her intentions to be a part in the corporation are well-known to anyone who cared to ask.

“Well…” And he’s off.

OooO

Lexa may be Aden’s—unsubstantiated and, perhaps, presumptive—favorite, but he likes Anya rather quiet a lot as well. Lexa thinks it’s because Anya treats him exactly the same way she treats everyone, with ruthless teasing about anything and everything and the occasionally rough, physical gruffness her affection primarily manifests as. Right now, Lexa is watching Aden demolish his older sister at some video game or another and listening to Anya’s expletives grow louder and more obscene the farther behind she falls.

Gustus taps her lightly on the shoulder, and jerks his head towards the deck out back when she turns her attention to him. She follows him out without another word.

Lexa has never been as close with Gustus as she is with Anya or Aden. He is a good man, a good brother. She loves him, would bleed and die for him, as she truly believes he would for her, because he is family and that means something to they who have lost it or never had it and then found it here in this place with these people. But he is not someone she speaks to on personal things. They do not discuss their love lives, if there is anything there to even be discussed, make only polite small talk in relation to friends and colleagues.

This, Lexa can feel in her bones, will be a discussion of personal things, and it will not be polite small talk.

They settle in comfortable lounge chairs, the sun warming them despite its slow descent below the horizon. It’s a comfortable silence for a while. Lexa and Gustus have never felt the need to fill space with more words than necessary.

“Do I need to break his hands?” Gustus finally speaks, just when Lexa was beginning to think that perhaps he will not speak at all.

“He’d let you.” Lexa says, trying not to think about it, not wanting to think about it. It is a part of her past, a footnote that should be left behind and forgotten. It has no relevance in the here and now. “I, however, would not.”

“It was consensual? You were safe?” Gustus asks, and Lexa wishes he would just stop. It’s none of Gustus’ business, truly. He has no right to these truths just because he asks for them.

“If you insinuate that Roan fucking _raped_ me ever again, Gustus, I will burn you to the ground.” Lexa grits out. “I am an adult. I am fully capable of choosing my own bedfellows. I do not need you to lumber behind me playing bodyguard. If his hands touched me, it is because I allowed them to. If he was inside me, it is because I wanted him to be. If I had wanted him to stop, he would have stopped. What must you think of me, that you would even ask? That you thought for a moment that I could love a man capable of such a horrible thing. That would stay his friend, his roommate, after he had done it.”

Another long silence, this one far less comfortable.

“I’m sorry.” He is the picture of contrition, bowed head and clasped hands. “I am only concerned. You know I worry about you. About all of you.”

This, Lexa knows, is true. Gustus is protector to the very core. But that is not an excuse for not trusting her to be able to protect herself.

“Roan Arawn Azgeda is my _best friend_ , Gustus.” Lexa says, slowly, still with a touch of anger. “I don’t need protection from him.”

OooO

Lexa doesn’t know whatever song is chirping at her from her phone, a dead giveaway as to the caller. Roan can’t seem to stop himself from assigning himself a new personalized ringtone every other month. Or, more accurately, Lexa can’t seem to stop Roan from assigning himself a new personalized ringtone every other month.

“You landed safely, I see.”

“Nope. The plane is on fire and we’re nosediving towards the ocean. Wanted you to have my last words.”

“Choke on a dick.”

“I’ve considered it. But I can’t even get it up for Chris Hemsworth, so I figure the cause is probably lost.”

“Oh, how desperately I’ve missed these conversations. Goodbye, Roan.”

“Hey, now. Don’t be mean. I just spent way too much time crammed in a seat with leg room for someone of your height rather than mine. Be nice to me, I’m your favorite person.”

“Aden is my favorite person.”

“Second favorite?”

“Anya.”

“I am your third favorite person—”

“Titus.”

“Why do you want to hurt me?”

“You skipped leg day.”

“Once! A year ago! This punishment is cruel and unusual, and it does not match the crime.”

“Fine, I relent. I concede. You are a gift to humanity. I adore you. Next?”

“Excellent. So I was just calling to let you know that I’ve landed. I’m in the car right now, rapidly approaching Azgeda Manor with all the appropriate bells and whistles.”

“So none at all then.”

“Just the well-deserved feeling of abject doom and despair!” Roan chirps with more cheer than is probably mentally sound.

“Get back on a plane. Come to LA. Titus will be thrilled to see you.”

“Titus won’t give one shit. Anya will be vaguely annoyed. Gustus will do his weird looming threat thing. And Aden will deeply, deeply uncomfortable.”

The man isn’t wrong, not about any of it, but Lexa does not _care_. “Come anyways. Because you want to. Because I asked you to.”

“No.” Roan sighs like the world is crushing down on his chest. “Mustn’t disappoint Mother.”

_Fuck_ Nia.

“If you’re sure.”

“About this? I always am.”


End file.
